Sabbatical | Customers, Etc.
Embracing a season of rest.
A handful of my coworkers over the years have chosen to step away from work for a time and take a sabbatical. Sometimes the company they worked for offered a formal paid sabbatical program. Other times it was planned ahead, but on personal time. Still other times it was unplanned, more or less forced upon them. In all cases I was envious.
“I would love to take a sabbatical, if only I had the time.”
“I would love to take a sabbatical, if I only I had the money.”
“I would love to take a sabbatical, if only I didn’t have to put my career on hold.”
Sometimes the feeling would be almost quaint, “wouldn’t it be nice…”, but other times—and if I’m honest, this was the more frequent variety—it would be pangs of longing, almost painful, “I really need this.” It’s not that my life in these moments was particularly bad, more that there seemed to be something fundamentally missing and I wanted the time and space to explore it. Or rather, I wanted to be something else, but couldn’t figure out how to get there. “Oh well, someday….”
Discovering sabbatical
I hadn’t really been thinking the current season of my life as a sabbatical. Sure, I was taking time to be present, but even when I was retreating from the world for a bit, it was with the sense of “I’ll get back out there soon.” But something wasn’t settling with me. I was reading a short book called Domestic Monastery by Richard Rolheiser that I had picked up on my retreat. This paragraph really resonated with me (emphasis mine):
During all the most active years of our lives we are reminded daily, sometimes hourly, that time is not our own; we are monks [metaphorically speaking] practicing a demanding asceticism. There will not always be time to smell the flowers, and we are not always poorer for that fact. Monasticism has its own spiritual payoffs. To be forced to work, to be tied down with duties, to have to get up early, to have little time to call your own, to be burdened with the responsibility of children and the demands of debts and mortgages, to go to bed exhausted after a working day is to be in touch with our humanity. It is too an opportunity to recognize that time is not our own and that any mature spirituality makes a distinction between the season of work and the Sabbath, the sabbatical, the time of unpressured time.
“A distinction between the season of work and the Sabbath”—that line really stuck out to me. I couldn’t get it out of my head. “Maybe that’s what this is. It’s not a vacation, not a break from work. It’s a season of rest.” The more I played with it the more it stuck.
Am I really doing this?
My first feeling when asking myself if I could really take a sabbatical more intentionally was, “Wait, can I really do this?” followed closely by, “Can I afford it?”
The question about finances is very real, and if it weren’t from the privilege of having some padding in our savings account, I wouldn’t have been able to responsibly discern if I could afford to be more intentional about embracing this season of rest in my life. Our family has a lot of expenses and so my main anxiety was about seeing the balance of my savings account go down. “I worked so hard for that money—it’s mine.” I realized the question was less about “Can I afford it?” and more about “Am I willing to let go of the anxiety associated with how much money is in the bank account? Can I be okay with less?”
Interestingly, I was reminded of a time when my wife, Emily, and I gave away a used car, which I wrote about a while back:
I’ll never forget the feeling of driving the car as I was about to give it away. The thought entered my head, “this car isn’t really mine anyway.” I mean, sure, I legally owned it, but it was like there was a line item on the cosmic balance sheet that moved the car from someone who didn’t need it to someone who did. I was just the person assisting with the transaction.
I started to think about our savings in a similar way. “Maybe it’s okay to let the bank account balance go down a bit. Maybe it’s okay to be intentional and spend some of our savings on this sabbatical, this time of rest. Maybe it’s okay to not be so anxious.”
Lest you think I made this decision in a vacuum, when I told Emily I was considering being intentional about taking a sabbatical, she was enthusiastically on board.
Focus
One question I’ve been asked a lot lately—and it’s a totally fair question—is, “What do you want to do next?” I’ve become a lot more comfortable saying, “I don’t know”. I used to feel embarrassed giving that answer. Now, not so much. I’m also much more comfortable saying, “I’m embracing this season of rest.”
Speaking of, I’m not sure “season of rest” is the best way to capture it. Yes, it’s a season of rest from work outside of the home, but I’m more plugged into family life within my home than I ever have been. There are probably many posts to be written about why I feel called to continue to dive deeper into family life, but suffice it to say that’s my purpose for the present moment. Emily is on retreat this week1 and I’m running the household on my own. I’m getting so much done. I’m exhausted. I love it. It’s not exactly “rest” in the traditional sense, but it’s exactly where I’m called to be in this moment.
What about work? Work will be there when the time is right. I’m still #opentowork on LinkedIn. I’m still meeting people for lunch and coffee, listening to what problems are out in the world, and seeing where I might be a fit. But I don’t have a personal OKR to have some many interviews in a week so I can have a job by a month from next Tuesday. At least not yet. My focus now is the season of rest.
She’s at St. Meinrad, the same place I went on retreat. She’s loving it.
I love being comfortable with saying "I don't know," that's a major maturity unlock. Enjoy this season friend.