Today’s author is Prince of Peace member, Christer Cederberg.
Traveling home to be with family and friends always has been important to me, but to travel home one first will need time off from work … vacation days. This is a challenge in the United States where most people get two to four weeks of vacation. Swedes get between five and eight weeks.
Travel home to Sweden is important also for our kids, as we want them to keep developing their Swedish language and to better understand Swedish culture – no easy task on just a couple of weeks per year.
In general, we all travel together, but at times I have had company shutdown over Thanksgiving week, and then I would take my son Gabe with me. Two of those years he attended Swedish school for a few of the days, which was interesting for him … and for the other students. One worriedly asked: “Will we have to speak English with him?” Gabe found it amazing that his classmates, who all had cell phones in 2009, didn’t get distracted by them and just continued their schoolwork while the teacher left during class.
When we travel together it is a huge task scheduling every day … or by the hour. Long ago we used to write postcards to our Stockholm friends and give a time and place to picnic with us… come rain or shine. Somehow, we always had luck with both weather and attendance. We had so much fun bringing friends together, who had not seen each other since the last time we did this.
But visiting family and friends for just a few days also can be stressful. Everything gets compressed into a few days, and uncomfortable discussions become uncomfortably impossible as everyone is always together. There is little room for that one-on-one time needed to understand what is going on inside the other person. Discussions may become superficial, and nobody wants to “rock the boat.”
We need more time face-to-face throughout the year, which has been hard to get. Thirty years ago, voice calls were well over a dollar a minute. Today, we make video calls several times a week basically at no cost. But even the use of FaceTime on an iPhone every day cannot replace sitting with someone on a dock, watching a swan couple majestically fly across the water, while discussing things on our minds.