I’m back from Hawaii but remember — I went to WORK!  My goal was to find wild rivers on whom I could test our hypothesis:

The most playful play IS rest. AND work. So ALL of daily life is… vacation.

Here are my field notes:

Fail?

My vacation reading list is an identically blank page; I spent zero hours on a computer; and since I was travelling with my two stoic male types, there wasn’t even much conversation. The week was weirdly wordless.

Weird because I like words. A lot. Reading them, writing them, scrolling through them in texts and tweets and posts. Talking them! Listening to them!!

Instead I walked. Snorkeled. Slept. Splashed in waves. Slept. Hiked to waterfalls. STOOD in waterfalls. Slept. And, most wonder-fully of all, SURFED ( pix here!).

So, my week ended up mostly play and sleep. BUT physics-wise, you most certainly have noticed I ALSO performed work the whole time — that is, I was always moving something somewhere. For example:

• Paddling, paddling, paddling my board back out to the lineup. Okay there wasn’t really much of a lineup other than my son and Ricardo, our 49-year old Peruvian surf instructor (we were lucky The Sisters weren’t there since Ricardo had a whole Antonio-Banderas-as-ripped-surfer thing going on), but I must practice surfer jargon. The day said son graduates from high school, I turn surf bum.

• Expanding my lungs to inhale, then compressing them to exhale – over and over, loudly, through my mouth and into a tight little tube, while keeping my entire face submerged even though I’m scared of water. (Yes you read that right. Ironical? Or just fodder for a “feel the fear and do it anyway” post?)

• Casting my eyes from three whales blowing on the left side of the horizon to two breaching on the right while otherwise holding completely still in a lounge chair.

• Stretching smile muscles ’til my face hurt.

• Expanding my lungs to snore in, then compressing them to snore out – over and over, for 9 ½ hours each night.

While it doesn’t directly address our happy hypothesis, my trip proves this corollary:

A vacation is work — BECAUSE of the play — and therefore, deep rest.

But what about Hawaiian rivers — would my [non-existent though well-intended] field notes on their DAILY WORK-A-DAY LIFE have proven our original hypothesis? Take a look and let me know what you think:

Aloha, my dear friends.