Vacation

It is important to be hard-working and productive, but I have profound admiration for people who take vacationing seriously. Because it is a serious matter. Vacation requires an entire rearranging of your scheduled life; you must cancel weekly appointments, create special outgoing voice mails, and otherwise arrange for your absence. Vacation requires an understanding that everything can and will go on without you, the way it will when you die. As I said, vacation is a serious matter.

My husband's parents are vacationing role models. When Doug (my father-in-law) was going through graduate school, him and Kathy lived in a double-wide trailer and spent their college loan money on travels. My husband has no early childhood memories of video games (they didn't own a system), but he has seen every state minus Alaska and Washington. He also has been to Disney World 21 times in his 24 years (which, yes, I agree is excessive).

The best thing about spending your time and money on vacations, I think, is this: unlike material things that break or burn or get phased out, you will hardly ever regret a vacation. Even the terrible ones where you get into fights and break your ankle just turn into funny stories. So even though it's more difficult to plan a vacation than buy a new entertainment system, the memories never become out of style, and their value only increases as life moves on and seasons change.

I call that investment, not spending.