Vacation Withdrawal Quotes

Every person needs to take one day away.  A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future.  Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence.  Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.  Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.

The divine is in the present and you must be present to experience it. When you vacate the present and recede into your mind, allowing worries or work to remove you from the moment, you leave the plain upon which the divine dwells. When you are constantly under the anesthetic of digital distraction, you withdraw; you are no longer conscious, and therefore are in no fit state to commune with the sacred. If you wish to hear the answers you seek, you must be present to hear them. If you wish to partake in the insights there to be known, you must be present to receive them. If you wish to know the divine, you must be present to meet it. …you must be present.

In front of me, Cole’s smile had emptied. His eyes were going blank, which was what happened to Cole when you hurt him. The real Cole vacated the situation and left his body standing by itself.

The divine is in the present and you must be present to experience it. When you vacate the present and recede into your mind, allowing worries or work to remove you from the moment, you leave the plain upon which the divine dwells. When you are constantly under the anesthetic of digital distraction, you withdraw; you are no longer conscious, and therefore are in no fit state to commune with the sacred. If you wish to hear the answers you seek, you must be present to hear them. If you wish to partake in the insights there to be known, you must be present to receive them. If you wish to know the divine, you must be present to meet it. …you must be present.

divert daily (even for an hour); withdraw weekly (take a day off); quarantine quarterly (get out of town for a night or two); abandon annually (family vacation); and if at all possible, go on a literal sabbatical every few years (which I have never done).

The United States could afford to leave Afghanistan, albeit with tragic consequences for the Afghan people, who would again be subjugated by the Taliban, because that country was thousands of miles away from America. But an Israeli withdrawal from large areas in Judea and Samaria would place the Islamists a few thousand meters from all of our major cities. We would hand the hills around Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to Hamas. A terrorist organization supported by Iran and committed to our destruction would take over the heart of our homeland and threaten our survival. US officials repeatedly underestimated the power of the Islamists and overestimated the power of their non-Islamist allies. Unless you have forces with an equal commitment to fight and die to defend their country, the Islamists eventually win. As long as Israeli forces held on to territories adjoining Israel, the Islamists would be kept at bay. The minute we vacated those territories, the Islamists would take over, as did Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

Two weeks later, Sharon formally announced his plan to vacate a total of twenty-five communities—twenty-one Israeli communities in the Gaza Strip and four in Northern Samaria.1 Two weeks after that, he invited me to a meeting to try to mollify me. “When Israel withdraws unilaterally,” I said, “we know what Israel gives, but what does Israel get?” Specifically I raised the troubling likelihood that Hamas would take over the areas we vacated and use them to attack Israel.

So he rescripted himself. It was a process he had learned when he was a young man imprisoned in Cell 54, a solitary cell in Cairo Central Prison, as a result of his involvement in a conspiracy plot against King Farouk. He learned to withdraw from his own mind and look at it to see if the scripts were appropriate and wise. He learned how to vacate his own mind and, through a deep personal process of meditation, to work with his own scriptures, his own form of prayer, and rescript himself. He records that he was almost loath to leave his prison cell because it was there that he realized that real success is success with self. It’s not in having things, but in having mastery, having victory over self.

A few days later, Pellegrini took his wife on vacation in Anguilla. Stopping at an automated-teller machine in the hotel lobby on New Year's Eve to withdraw some cash, she checked the balance of their checking account. She was immediately taken aback. On the screen before her was a figure she had never seen before, at least not on an ATM. It's not clear how many others ever had, either: $45 million, newly deposited in their joint account. It was Pellegrini's bonus for the year, including some deferred compensation. He was still special to John Paulson, after all. In truth, Pellegrini had withheld more from his bonus than he needed in order to pay the year's taxes, so the figure in the bank account that day was skimpier than it could have been. Paulson paid him about $175 million for his work in 2007. Pellegrini would never again have to worry about finding a career, keeping a job, or stretching his savings. "Wow," his wife said quietly, still staring at the ATM. Then they left, arm in arm, to meet a chartered boat to take them to nearby St. Barts. Paulson did quite well for himself as well. His hedge fund got to keep 20 percent of the $15 billion or so gains of all his funds. He also was a big investor in the credit funds. His personal tally for 2007: nearly $4 billion. It was the largest one-year payout in the history of the financial markets.