Waiting for paradise

True confessions: On a flight to Chicago last week, I watched--okay I binged watched—HGTV’s “Bahamas Life,” wherein couples tour gasp-worthy beach-front homes in, yes, the Bahamas (a chain of 700 islands located 110 miles off the southern coast of Florida…see it’s educational!) During each 22-minute episode, the word “paradise” is uttered frequently. So are the words “stress” and “escape.”

 This is the common narrative thread: Our life at home is pressured and busy. We don’t spend a lot of time together. Here, on this “piece of heaven,” we can live as we always wanted to live. We can live the life we have dreamed of living. Finally, we get to sit back and relax and enjoy the “fruits of our labor.”

 And my reaction was not envy. I mean the white sand beaches were lovely. And the water was startlingly turquoise. I am not an idiot. I see the attraction. But mostly I was struck by this statement: Now we get to live the life we always wanted to live.

 Meaning that these folks had been busy living lives they didn’t want to live for decades. Sitting comfortably 30,000 feet above the earth, I felt such sadness for them. I wondered how distant their real lives were from their dream lives. And then I also got a little judge-y. (Me? Judge-y?) Their dream life was lazing around on some beach? That was what they worked and saved for, what they dreamed of? (Yes, some also planned to fish or kayak.)

Tom and I often joked—but really it wasn’t a joke—that we didn’t need to “escape” our lives and go on a vacation. We did love to travel, and occasionally (but not that often) we might find ourselves on a beach. But it was a point of pride that we had made the choices that allowed us to live a life we (mostly) loved in the moment, to build a “paradise” where we lived, how we lived.

 Had we put our dreams on hold…well, I do not have to complete that sentence.

 I exited Bahamas Life and watched a Tom Petty documentary.