Luxury escaping
"Wasting time changes the nature of time. And the heart is stilled."
Rose Tremain - The Gustav Sonata
We have just returned from our week long luxury escape in Port Douglas. We stayed in a very beautiful hotel - the Sheraton Grand Mirage, did virtually nothing and ate too much, mostly pretty good and a bit pricey food. It was all somehow unreal. A bubble with little connection to the 'real' world.
And yet, of course, it is a very real world for the people who work there - a mix of professional hotel management personnel, charming and beautiful backpackers from almost every corner of the world, and locals who fulfil various roles within the hotel. These people slave away, well work hard, in their real world to provide an unreal experience for the hotel guests, who come from their own real world to experience a short-lived bit of luxury. And in time the workers will of course take time off to go to some other, for them, exotic location. For the backpackers of course this is not only a job, but an experience - one they will remember all of their lives and their stay in Port Douglas will most likely be short. They will make friends, maybe even meet a lifetime partner, party, learn new skills, new languages and experience a multitude of countries and cultures. For them the moment is real, but the whole year or two years, whatever they have taken, is time out from their 'real' lives back home. An escape from the known. A luxury they have been able to afford either through their own hard work or their parents' generosity. A luxury escape that is very different from our luxury escape.
When I go on a holiday like this I always feel it is all so slightly unreal. It's a contrived environment after all, one which has taken time, money and lots of skill to create and maintain. I do try to make sure that I cut myself off from the media world of 'the news' whatever that might be at the time. I have come to learn over the years, that anything of true importance in the world, will filter through even if you are avoiding media. Someone will tell you. There will be something in the air. You cannot escape the big events of history. And in the meantime you can pretend the outside world and its myriad of problems does not exist.
And this holiday was even more of an unreal bubble than some others that I have had. For we more or less did nothing. On the Sunday we visited the local market. On a few occasions we dined in Port Douglas, but we just went into town, ate our meal and came back to our hotel room. A routine was established - shower, breakfast, sit by the pool reading a book, go for a long walk around the gorgeous grounds - a picture post coming on that - rest in the room when it became cool late in the afternoon - David sleeping, me blogging, dinner, a bit of TV and bed. I have read three books in the course of the week and written a blog every day. But I have done nothing else. No cooking, no cleaning, no washing, no shopping. Nothing. At times I have felt almost bored - but not quite - there is always something to see even if you sit in the same spot for hours. Rose Tremain's quote at the top of the page, which I came across whilst reading her book by the pool, is so apt. The heart is truly stilled. Enforced leisure means that you cannot worry about the trivia of the every day, and the bigger worries of life can be shelved for a time.
Two words - luxury escaping - with so many different meanings. Reverse them and they mean something completely different. I looked them up in my dashboard dictionary.
LUXURY
"Luxury is a word of uncertain signification, and may be taken in a good as in a bad sense" David Hume
"The media is constantly redefining what luxury is. Luxury can be a dirty sock if dressed up in the right way." Zac Posen
In my online dictionary it has three separate but related definitions:
1. "a state of great comfort or elegance, especially when involving great expense."
The hotel was certainly comfortable and elegant too in a very tropical way. White on blue as it were. Palm trees - the most elegant of trees are everywhere and their swaying fronds can be observed with great pleasure for long moments of time. How many shades of green, yellow, orange, brown are there in one palm tree frond? And the lagoons that wrap themselves around the resort are excessive and beautiful. They make the resort what it is.
"Especially when involving great expense."
Well yes and certainly out of reach of the poor, which is a guilty thought, but anyone can walk through the grounds and down to the beach. And the expense, though quite high, is obviously not out of the reach of hardworking tradies - we met several of them there. There are deals to be found online, and if, as my son does, you put money away into a 'holiday' fund, and you keep your eye out for super specials and last minute deals, then you too can have a luxury escape at the Sheraton Mirage and the like. You don't, after all, have to stay in the most expensive room - ours was a mid-range room with a view of the lagoons - the network of swimming pools that surround the hotel buildings, but there are 'garden view' rooms that simply look out into the gorgeous grounds. Besides, how much time do you have to spend in your room? And you don't have to eat at the hotel - you can go into town and eat fairly inexpensively there. Luxury has become much more affordable these days.
2. "an essential, desirable item which is expensive or difficult to obtain."
'Essential'. I'm not sure that you can describe anything in the same sentence as essential and desirable. These are surely not the same thing. And really - nothing about this holiday was essential. Desirable yes, essential no. But then again I can see that in some circumstances - an extremely overextended working life perhaps - it would be essential to get away from that from time to time. For us - not essential.
'Desirable' - well define desirable - it means a million different things according to who you are and what you desire. For us I guess it was warmth, sun and no everyday worries. At home you can never get away from daily tasks - so I guess for us it is desirable to have somebody else do everything for you - well not everything - but all the mundane things like feeding yourself.
'Expensive' again. And the same applies.
'Difficult to obtain' I think that in this sense life has changed. It is no longer difficult for even the average worker - I am of course talking about the 'western' world - to be able to obtain, relatively easily, a week away in some luxury spot, or an expensive meal out to celebrate a birthday or an anniversary. But then again I guess some things are difficult to obtain - tickets to some highly desired event, a booking at a top, top restaurant, a booking at a top hotel. But mostly even these can be overcome by planning and forethought. You just need the money.
“Luxury is the ease of a t-shirt in a very expensive dress.” Karl Lagerfeld
Luxury is just a word - a word that has been redefined over the centuries and continues to redefine itself. Take a look at the word's history. It comes from Middle English when it denoted lechery, and in turn this came form the Old French words, luxurie and luxure, which are derived from the Latin luxuria, from luxus which means excess.
Ultimately all of these meanings are derogatory really. Luxury is not seen as a good thing. So should I feel bad about a week at a luxury hotel in Port Douglas? And I do admit that there were times when I felt bad about it - as I have all through my life when I have been treated to such luxury. Maybe it comes from growing up poor.
“The materialistic view of happiness of our age [is] starkly revealed in our understanding of the word 'luxury.'" Alain de Botton
But then luxury employs so many people, although, of course, luxury goods have a bad reputation in that respect because of how some of them are produced.
3. "a pleasure obtained only rarely"
I wonder. What about those people who live in a world of luxury in the usually accepted sense of expensive and rare? They can have these things all the time. So are they then luxuries? Can the super rich not experience luxury? Maybe in their case luxury means intangibles like happiness, solitude, privacy.
ESCAPE
Escape has four definitions in my dashboard dictionary.
1. "an act of breaking free from confinement or control"
I guess we all, at times, feel confined and restricted, maybe even controlled by the roles we have chosen or been allotted in life. And so escaping from these to a totally different environment is something we all aspire to. It's not permanent though is it? Although maybe those backpackers who are escaping perhaps the expectations laid upon them by their elders and society at large, can, in fact, escape those expectations permanently. They may find a new career, a new place to live, a new person to spend it with. Freedom to party and do as they please as long as they are prepared to live simply and inexpensively, and work in menial jobs from time to time. Not a 'luxury' escape in the expensive sense though. But luxury in the sense that they are answerable to nobody but themselves.
2. "an act of avoiding something dangerous or unpleasant"
Not really applicable when combined with the word 'luxury' I think. Unpleasant maybe - if your life is not going the way you thought it would, but dangerous - unlikely. Not even to the backpackers.
3. "a means of escaping from somewhere"
Backpackers again, but for us and the luxury escape this would only be a valid definition of the escape part of the equation if we really didn't like where we lived. And if we can afford a 'luxury escape' then we are unlikely to be living somewhere we do not like.
4. "a form of temporary distraction from reality or routine"
Yes indeed - as previously discussed and as summed up beautifully by Rose Tremain. Yes we wasted time in the sense that we were not doing 'good' things, but we did not waste time in the sense of rediscovering calm. Let's hope that we can carry it back home with us.
Yes - I know - no food. But I just wanted to somehow mull over the unreality of it all and what it all means now that I am back to reality and two extra kilos of weight. That was my own personal little luxury. No fasting, and no thinking about what I was eating. Now I pay for it!
