Working vacation

.
If ever there was a contradiction in terms, it is the ‘working vacation’. After all, shouldn’t it be work or vacation? Isn’t vacation the things you have to rest from busy work schedules etc.? And doesn’t ‘vacation’ simply doing nothing ~ or if you rather have a more active vacation, doing those things you don’t get to do while you are not on vacation?

But what if the work you do truly is your passion? Then vacation can become a time that is boring; something that brings restlessness rather than rest in such a way that stress levels can soar. Then again, no matter how much fun your job is ~ everybody needs a break every once in a while. If only in order to be able to step back from the day-to-day running of things and keeping track of our often overfilled calendars. When we take a little time to take that step back, we can come back to our jobs refreshed, even seeing the work we so love doing through new eyes...
It is something we benefit from; just as the work we feel so passionate about does.

So, if taking time off; time to give ourselves a breather is so important to us ~ why then the working vacation?

It all hinges on how much work is involved on the vacation.
If it is a lot of work, then suddenly the cost of our vacation become work related expenses and as such a tax deduction. Is the time off mostly vacation, it can point to an inexpensive research trip which in the future may lead to more extensive work in that area.

The third perspective can be just as interesting, although from a slightly different perspective...
What if the things you do in your work; the things you are passionate about are widely varied to the point that some of them have a tendency to fall by the wayside every once in a while. Then a working vacation can be a terrific way to pick up on that activity and explore new manners of incorporating it into your regular ‘work’ again.
Even if that just means that the pictures taken on your working vacation provide the new artwork for the office walls...

That being said, personally I still feel a little bit ambiguous about the working vacation. Even as the working vacations I have been on always have been a great lot of fun ~ as I get back to every day life; back to work, I never quite know whether what I have done in the past week or so has been work or vacation.
Somehow, in my mind I keep having trouble merging the them...
.
.