How I Got Over the Post-Holiday Blues

So you’re back staring at your nature desktop background in envy, thinking ‘How did I get here?’. Instead of letting the days go by, Explorer Sharona let the water lift her up and out of post-holiday blues.

During the first day back at work after my holidays, I found myself feeling disconcertingly out of my body. It felt like there had been a terrible, terrible mixup; that some sort of cosmic clerical error had occurred.

My body was here at a desk in an office facing a computer, but my mind was there: still in Queenstown, swimming in the bright blue, sparklingly cold waters of Lake Whakatipu.

The kinda blues I like

For every high, there’s a low. And amongst the office-going, desk job-having crowd, there’s no low more common than the post-holiday blues.

I was lucky enough to spend two weeks on the South Island of New Zealand over the holidays, and I filled my time hiking, swimming, and generally being outdoors with friends. Not a low in sight.

Ok New Zealand, we get it!

But at my desk, the feeling that something was wrong persisted throughout the entire day.

As the end of the day approached, I pulled out my phone, opened Google Maps, and typed ‘nearest water’. That didn’t bring up anything particularly useful, but as I looked at the map, I spotted the Murrumbidgee River – and I remembered that during a hot spell in Canberra a few years ago, my friends and I made several trips to Uriarra Crossing, a swimming spot on the river. It turned out Uriarra Crossing was a 29-minute drive from my work.

As the work day ended, as if I were under a spell, I found myself getting into my car, driving to the crossing (which was all but deserted), and stepping into the rushing water of the river.

The waters were muddy, not perfectly clear, and blue. But they were fresh and revitalising in their own way.

Murrumbidgee River

After my swim, I sat on the bank of the river (I always keep towels and picnic blankets in my boot for moments just like this) and I read a book in the sun. I munched on a sleeve of slightly stale Ritz crackers that I dug out from my glovebox. A downy magpie hopped around me, eyeing off my snacks.

As I lounged on the grass, I thought about what a friend once said while we spotted birds soaring above us at Lake Whakatipu – that whenever he saw a bird flying, he always thought about how he’d never see that exact same bird fly in that exact same way ever again.

Peckish little friend

That it was a moment you experienced and it would never ever be exactly the same, and how everything in life is sort of like that.

This made me think about how you can spend your life at your desk dreaming of your next holiday. Or you can try to bring holidays into your life. Nap in the sun, have a caramel sundae for dinner, hike up the nearest mountain to watch the sunrise, or like me, jump into the closest river.

Get yourself to a body of water, stat!

Author and Pulitzer Prize-winner, Annie Dillard, once wrote: ‘How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing’.

And within that hour, I went to the river.

Read more: The Bodies That Hold Us