Your summer vacation is not a reset button.

Photo by Vicko Mozara on Unsplash

Your summer vacation is not a reset button, it’s an escape.

While this statement may not be true for everyone, it certainly is true for most.

We turn off our phones, we go offline, we disconnect, we spend time with our friends, our families, and go to magically wondrous places around the world, while someone else hangs back and makes sure the lights stay on in the office while we’re away.

But the problems don’t go away just because we do. In fact, sometimes they get bigger, and what usually happens is that we rest enough on vacation to have perhaps a slightly higher motivation to tolerate our problems than we did before we left. Here’s a truth: problems don’t go away when we enter onto a spiritual path, or when we gain emotional intelligence, or when we hire a coach, either. But here’s another truth: they do evolve, which makes life significantly more interesting, meaningful, and fulfilling.

There’s nothing worse that tripping up on the same crap over and over again, feeling like you’re getting nowhere fast, and yet that's how most of us live our lives. The often quoted definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over, and to expect different results.

What would it take for you to let your problems evolve?