HOPE VACATIONS AND REST
Thursday, 10th July 2025
TO FIND TRUTHS AND BUILD HOPE VACATIONS AND REST
With summer, vacation season arrives for many people and institutions around the world. This is a time and space in the life of the human being that, well managed, has a comprehensive impact on the person, both physically and mentally, which plays out in their interpersonal and social relationships and the productivity of companies and society as a whole.
Vacations are more than a luxury; they are a biological and psychological need. They recharge new energies, reduce stress, prevent diseases, and reduce exhaustion and fatigue (burnout) from our draining daily lives and routines. Vacations help us disconnect from overwhelming workloads and reduce anxiety, allowing us to find our sense of well-being.
Vacations allow us to clear our heads and open ourselves to new existential horizons, to new projects and perspectives in life, strengthen our fundamental and necessary affective ties for life, and allow us to rediscover interests and activities that enrich our lives and health and that – due to the daily hustle and bustle – we postpone or abandon.
Seen this way, vacations are a time to invest in our health, our comprehensive personal, family, and social well-being, and our work and professional performance. In short, vacations are the appropriate time for rest.
We understand that rest does not mean abandoning our usual duties, tasks, and obligations, so we can dedicate ourselves to sleep and do nothing. If we ignore that truth, vacations and everything associated with them would become a waste of time and opportunity.
Rest during vacation must be time that we invest in situations that allow our recovery and physical and mental restoration, the strengthening of our body and our mind, to resume, with new impetus and better quality, with new energies, the activities in which we are usually productive and with which we all contribute to the progress and development of our companies, institutions, and society.
Ignoring the importance of vacations and rest can have serious and grave consequences on the development of human life, coexistence, and social progress.
Vacations have become more critical and relevant in a society and world where multiple factors threaten our ability to rest.
Our society, pushed by technological advances, is ever frenzied due to competition and high societal expectations that must be met and fulfilled, which progressively hinders the possibility that we can rest.
Increasingly, our personal lives and social coexistence occur in urban environments and megacities that never sleep. We live in a constantly accelerating world, available 24/7, permanently agitated and stimulated by hyper connection, information overload, and the unchecked expansion of telecommunications.
All this means that “stress” is a pandemic brought on by our growing incapability to respect our human biological rhythms, combined with our consumption of stimulants, inadequate diets, sedentary lifestyles, work and its irregular schedules, and uncomfortable environments, anxiety, depression, etc.
The combination of these and other factors in our society of very high demand, enormous competition, and unstoppable and permanent connectivity, challenges every person’s urgent need for rest that repairs, dignifies, and humanizes us. This is especially true for everyone alive today, in our society and world.
Uncertainty, especially, marks our historical and social moment. We live in a time lacking certainties in our political, economic, labor, and migratory spheres. Vacations and due rest also invite us to introspection, silence, to journey within ourselves and find peace and reconciliation with others and the environment, and to overcome the frustrations with which daily life and its insecurity, hesitations, and suspicions overwhelm us.
I invite you all to experience this season of vacation through a creative and productive pause. May this summer and year be for those who take vacations, a moment of encounter with the best of ourselves and others, to discover certainties and build hope in our present and towards a better personal, family, and social future.
