The latest book I’m on (audiobook) is Sapiens – A brief history of human kind by Yuval Noah Harari. It’s one of those books that I saw too many people with and heard too many people talk about to ignore and not try myself. It is a cracker (not finished yet, only about half way through)
It’s the type of book that makes you want to look the author up on Wikipedia and find out about him – a Jewish historian, a Tenured Professor in an Israeli University ad younger than me, writing about concepts that are bigger than all of us.
It has received critical acclaim and criticism in equal abundance and he went on to write his second book which undoubtedly I will go and visit.
The themes explored in this book are way, way too big for me to even touch upon in a blog like this but at a lower level he has a fantastic insight into holidays as he discussed how most of the concepts that we design our life around are entirely imaginary. Like everything else it seems that holidays have acquired an enormous degree of inflation and have risen to levels beyond anything reasonable. It’s now seen as such a status symbol in many aspects of British life to see where you go on holiday to that it has become comical.
Nowhere is this exhibited better than in the stag do where no it’s almost commonplace for people to go to the United States or for week long trips somewhere to celebrate getting married in advance.
This is not a criticism of where anyone goes on holiday; it’s related to the concept of why we go on holiday (very relevant to me at the moment as i’m on holiday!) and where we find our peace. I thought holidays were to relax, I thought they were to re-charge, I thought they were to allow us to renew ourselves, to go back and conquer the world once again. For me at least they’re pretty simple things. It’s not that I don’t like to explore places, I do and I’ve had some wonderful times, particularly in Barcelona recently with my family seeing faces I had been recommended to go to which were extraordinary but I don’t feel the ‘need’ to do this, it’s kind of just a happy coincidence.
The thing that interested me most about the reflection of holidays and Harari’s book though is why we can’t find peace at home in the places we decide to spend the majority of our lives. Why we can’t find peace at work in the place where we invest the majority of our efforts. Why we have to save up and spend our life and our time gathering money (another imaginary concept according to Harari) so that we can exchange it to go somewhere else to recharge.
Clearly thinking about these things I need to reflect back on myself and the way I live, this is not preaching to anybody else; It is always about talking to myself.
I dare you to read the book though.
Andy was the first person I saw that was reading it (listening) and then patients started to turn up with it. Be careful if you read it though because there is an outside chance that you might actually believe it and then where would the holiday industry be?!!
Disclaimer – every year Colin goes away to a caravan in Italy (for the past nine years anyway) it’s not that he can’t afford to go anywhere ‘better’ it’s just that him and his family love it there so he’s clearly a bit of a weirdo!
Blog Post Number - 1254
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