Hello. On the telephone you said we should hold off on the itinerary, that you’d ‘settle it once this busy spell is over’. After we hung up, we talked it over, and decided to take the liberty of writing you this letter.
We have been in this trade for over a decade, and we have seen a great many such ‘busy spells’. They share one trait: they run end to end. The close of one joins precisely to the opening of the next, like a snake that has bitten its own tail. The week that truly comes free is never waited for; it is marked out — the way you force a blank space onto a sheet already covered in writing.
We should like to tell you about another client. She too belonged to the ‘once I’m less busy’ school, until her family half-coaxed, half-pushed her off to a valley in Nepal. On the third day, in a small wood cabin with a fire burning, she took a hot-stone bath — stones from the river valley heated until scalding, then lowered into a wooden tub scattered with mugwort, the temperature adjusted stone by stone. The old man adding the stones spoke no English; before dropping each one into the water he would glance at her, she would nod, and the stone would fall with a hiss.
It was that rhythm, she said afterwards — the glance, the nod — that mended her. For three days no one asked her for a plan, there were no meeting invitations, and the only thing she had to decide was whether the water should be a little hotter.
A holiday requires no qualifying review; it needn’t be redeemed by being ‘less busy’. This letter is not to hurry you into fixing your dates — only to leave one line by your hand: that blank space on the calendar, no one else will keep it for you.
We are here whenever you are ready.