Two of the sweetest words I know are, in the context of a vacation, “not tomorrow.” They’re especially sweet after you’ve had a couple days off and you start feeling anxious that time is running out, only to realize that although work will start again soon it’s “not tomorrow.” You have another day when you can stay in your pajamas, read, watch movies, or, if you’re a certain personality type, write. Or play games, put a puzzle together, visit friends. Whatever it is you do to find meaning in life outside work. Outside academia I’ve never worked for a company that gave more than one day itself for the Christmas holiday. (Two, if you count New Year’s Day, but that’s technically on next year’s meager holiday tally sheet.)
Each year I cash in vacation days so that I can feel “not tomorrow” more than a day or two in a row. One of the more depressing recollections I remember is climbing onto an empty bus well before sunrise to commute to an otherwise empty office my first December working for Routledge since I hadn’t accrued enough vacation to take the week off. I’ve worked for two British companies and it doesn’t help knowing our colleagues in the UK automatically have that week off. Colonials, however, have far fewer holidays, and if that means trooping to the office for form’s sake, so be it. Very few people answer their emails between Christmas and New Year’s. Her majesty’s realm thrived for my presence, I’m sure.
The pandemic has taught us that many, if not most, workers are self-motivated when not confined to an office. We also know that the United States has the lowest life span among developed nations, and my guess is that one contributing factor is that we don’t have enough “not tomorrows” until it becomes literally true. Life is a gift, and spending it doing the things we value is something we tend to deny ourselves in the hopes that someday we might retire. Many companies have begun to cap the number of vacation days you can accrue at numbers so low that the year looks like a desert from January through late November. It’s that stretch of “tomorrow is a work day” punctuated by weekends so vapid that they vanish by the time errands you can’t do during the week are done. Why have we done this to ourselves? For me personally, I only have two more regular work days off. I’m beginning to feel anxious about it. Then I tell myself that, for today at least, although I have to start work again soon, it’s not tomorrow.
