Religious Education Update: August 12, 2007
On Vacation
We Americans have a terrible time taking vacation. We work more days than anyone else in the industrialized world, fail to use all the vacation time we’ve earned, and even take our laptaps with us so we can check our emails from work while traveling to exotic locations. Americans earn an average of 12.4 vacation days per year, compared to five weeks for a Japanese worker, or seven weeks for a German. Even with our comparatively low accrual rate, we turn back 1.6 million years’ worth of unused vacation back to our employers each year.
What do we earn from all our diligence? A Framingham Heart Study found that people who take two or more vacations a year cut their risk of a fatal heart attack in half. More and more, employers are realizing that excessive stress is killing their workforce and driving up health care costs.
As we enter the “dog days” of August, what used to be a time of doing nothing more than sitting on the beach and soaking up the sunshine, consider what we gain spiritually from time off. Five year old Eva from our congregation went to camp this summer, and what she remembers most are the shimmery clusters of frog eggs in the creek. She understands that these eggs will become tadpoles and later frogs. I asked her, “What comes first, the frog or the egg?” and she replied, “the frog, of course.”
Eva’s first grade class will likely discuss life cycles this year, and Eva will recall her sense of awe and wonder in discovering egg clusters beneath the redwoods in a sunny creek. While academic lessons provide some useful knowledge, nothing compares to standing ankle deep in a creek to appreciate the blessed gift of life in all its amazing forms.
Happy vacations!
Marlene Abel
Director of Religious Education
We Americans have a terrible time taking vacation. We work more days than anyone else in the industrialized world, fail to use all the vacation time we’ve earned, and even take our laptaps with us so we can check our emails from work while traveling to exotic locations. Americans earn an average of 12.4 vacation days per year, compared to five weeks for a Japanese worker, or seven weeks for a German. Even with our comparatively low accrual rate, we turn back 1.6 million years’ worth of unused vacation back to our employers each year.
What do we earn from all our diligence? A Framingham Heart Study found that people who take two or more vacations a year cut their risk of a fatal heart attack in half. More and more, employers are realizing that excessive stress is killing their workforce and driving up health care costs.
As we enter the “dog days” of August, what used to be a time of doing nothing more than sitting on the beach and soaking up the sunshine, consider what we gain spiritually from time off. Five year old Eva from our congregation went to camp this summer, and what she remembers most are the shimmery clusters of frog eggs in the creek. She understands that these eggs will become tadpoles and later frogs. I asked her, “What comes first, the frog or the egg?” and she replied, “the frog, of course.”
Eva’s first grade class will likely discuss life cycles this year, and Eva will recall her sense of awe and wonder in discovering egg clusters beneath the redwoods in a sunny creek. While academic lessons provide some useful knowledge, nothing compares to standing ankle deep in a creek to appreciate the blessed gift of life in all its amazing forms.
Happy vacations!
Marlene Abel
Director of Religious Education
posted by Unitarian Universalists of Petaluma @ 6:59 PM
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