What I love about holidays is that you can be gone just 5 days and feel completely free from all the constraints of normal life. I won’t say I don’t think about things back home – because I do – but I do with it with a different emphasis.

Holidays become times for dreaming rather than problem solving and in that I find great energy. Already I have had one fresh and unexpected ‘idea’ that I reckon could be a real winner when we get home and those ideas flow so much more readily when I am not in the mess of everyday life.

Because we have had some ongoing conflicts over the last 6 months at Quinns, I feel like I have had my eyes ‘down’ focusing on solving the issues at hand rather than my eyes ‘up’ looking to the horizon and envisaging what could be. I can’t live for long in an ‘eyes down’ posture, so it’s either ‘change the situation’ or ‘get out’ of the situation. As you may guess the conflict has come because we have chosen to run strongly with ‘change’.

While I can acknowledge that some of the conflict has been important, (someone’s got to do it sooner or later) it is not where I find my greatest joy and where I feel most alive so being in a place without conflict – on holidays – is a beautiful space to allow the dreamer to come alive again.

More than likely I will arrive back home with a bagful of wacky ideas, half of which will have any real currency and a quarter of which will actually ‘fly’, but then that’s ok isn’t it?