I haven't take a sabbatical, maybe not since maternity leave 30 years ago. But I have taken all social media off my cell phone for the last two years. And I try to remind myself to just be. Stay outside on a star-shot night and watch the moon rise. Notice beauty. Appreciate others, and the world. I am glad you hit the brakes on the "hectivity" of your life. You need it. It is good for you, the kids, and your co-workers. You got a break and everyone probably appreciated your extraordinary presence all the more. Welcome back.
Ah, you bring back so many memories with your honest, heart-full post, Courtney. Thank you for your insight and openness to this experience.
As college faculty, I was able to take a sabbatical in 2013-2014. It was the happiest year of my life. It started with dropping our youngest child off at college and then returning to our empty house to begin the process of rediscovering my spouse. We spent time alone together, had leisurely dinners or spent Saturdays in the garden. We deepened our relationship, catching up after our 22 hectic years of raising children. My daughter, calling home from college, quipped, "Instead of empty nest, it sounds like love nest over there!" I missed my children, but I had really missed my spouse, and even more, myself.
Perhaps the most incredible thing about this time was I spent it training for and walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain. I had been diagnosed 15 years earlier with a degenerative nerve disease that would slowly take away my ability to walk or use my hands. I was angry and grieving about how this was playing out in my numb feet, deteriorating muscles and terrible balance, and I wanted to take some time to figure out how I was going to integrate this disease into my reality, and not just resent and hate it. So I trained, sometimes with wonderful, supportive friends, but mostly alone, first walking 3-5 miles a day and working up to 15 miles a day with a full pack. I walked in beautiful places, sang, reflected, sobbed, prayed, listened to inspiring writers. After 9 months, I flew to Spain and did my solitary walk, every day relishing that I could do it and feeling deep gratitude for life and for the gift of this year of sabbatical. I found a kind of grace about my disease; it became a kind of teacher and friend. This time off changed my life. I hope the same for you.
WOW, this is incredible on multiple levels. I am in such a different stage of parenting life, but so love this vision to hold in my head when things get tough, chaotic, disconnected. Thank you. And what a beautiful ritual you created for yourself. So moving.
Hmm.. this is really interesting. I've been pretending that I'm on a sabbatical, but I'm not. I'm just sick.
But I can relate to aspects of this. I especially like the line about getting to "tend to my physical world, my forgotten desires, my body’s natural pace". There's an aspect to being sick that makes doing the some of the things you want to do impossible, so the process of tending to your desires involves a lot of listening without acting. But I find that even listening to my deepest hopes and desires changes me/my perspective even if I can't act on them now. Hopefully I will when the illness ends at some indeterminate future time.
I have stepped back from all work and worry about productivity because the doctors say that I need the rest. So the space that is left is somewhat similar except that I fill my time with a lot less. A lot of medicines, medical logistics, laying in bed both asleep and not quite but mostly asleep. I read very slowly but I do get to read. And lately I struggle to walk. But I am learning how to appreciate nature even when I'm slow- watching neighborhood phoebes nest and teach their young how to fly or a brood of ground hogs grow up and terrorize the neighborhood gardens. And recently I failed dramatically at going to a museum (too much walking!) but there is also something fantastic about sitting and focusing on a single painting or work of art for a long while (on a bench).
Realistically there's a limit to how much intention I can bring to my own period on pause. Sometimes pain or some other medical indignity hits and all I can do is turn to movies or silly things to take my attention away from the intensity of the physical experience. I am learning that I am loved by the people in my life even if I've slept for half of the day or the only thing I managed to do was take my medicine and do the dishes, that I am loved independently of what I produce, which I never really understood the way I do now.
I really hate being sick. But I do notice that being forced to stop completely for a long period (3+ months in, who knows how much more) has opened up my perspective. Even if I'm the only twenty year old in a tiny town hanging out with the sixty year olds!
Oh hp, I am so moved by this. Thank you for being honest about your real experience (highs, lows, and in betweens) and modeling such grace for all of us. I have some family members who have longterm chronic illnesses so this feels very close to my heart. Wishing you healing and a steady heart in the meantime.
Wayne Muller has a lovely book titled "Sabbath" that speaks to the need for these kind of experiences, and provides ideas for doing them in smaller bites, incorporating them in "everyday life." It's been indispensable for my wife and I -- bringing us back to ourselves and our human scale over and over again.
Love this Courtney - Our sabbaticals coincided. I also love making weird art and letting my mind wander without an agenda. I was surprised to realize that having let go of some of the emotional weight of my full time job, I was able to be WAY more present, engaged and energized by what was right in front of me....my family, my community, nature, food, and the chance to move my body. I also love my work but not at the expense of fully enjoying those must-haves.
So excited to hear you took some time off. Good for you!! I'm one month into an "unplanned sabbatical" after getting laid off. Decided to take a much-needed mental break for a couple months before starting to search for something new. You nailed it with your takeaways #1 and #2 - couldn't agree more!
Congratulations on your paddle boarding triumph! The reading list is formidable and commendable! I’d like to add Matthew Desmond, “Poverty, By America.”
It opens with this excellent quote from Tolstoy: “We imagine that their sufferings are one thing and our life another”. Its thesis is that poverty in the U.S. persists because the rest of us benefit from it.
Desmond is an esteemed professor of sociology at Princeton and the book is packed with data to show that America is the richest country on earth with more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why and how do we tolerate such egregious inequality? DD
I am glad you had this opportunity to grow, Courtney, and I am glad to have you back. Retirement was my first sabbatical, and you nail most of what it has been like. Thanks for the book recommendations. Here are some of mine: Chloe Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty; Laurie Frankl, This is How It Always Is; Fredrik Backman, Britt-Marie Was Here; Elizabeth Strout, Olive, Again; Liane Moriarty, Apples Never Fall; Caitlin Moran, More than a Woman; Sarah Winman, Still Life. Go from strength to strength, dear Courtney.
Upon the births of my first and third children, I took a couple of years off of work, making it just family time. And as a teacher I typically had a change of pace in summer. That change in routine, with an absence of deliverables or a clock that required me to be somewhere at a particular time, were helpful in resetting and noticing things that were always there but out of focus.
Now in my life, because of caretaking for loved ones who will need it even after I am gone, I have no sabbaticals in store.
For those of us for whom a sabbatical per se is not in the cards, it is important to find other forms of sanctuary and to be serious about embracing a rhythm of life that leaves regular space.
I am all for artistic adventures! I have some water color materials in view waiting for my chance. Usually I paint in acrylics, things that take maybe a couple of days each.
"For those of us for whom a sabbatical per se is not in the cards, it is important to find other forms of sanctuary and to be serious about embracing a rhythm of life that leaves regular space." Yes! I really feel this. Sabbaticals are like going sober for our busyness and we need more titrated ways of living the essence of them--lives that match our capacity for productivity, relationships, wonder, creativity etc.
The only times I have had like that was after baby and then the pandemic. Both times - everything sort of just stopped and I made way for things that mattered more to me. This sort of 'clearing of the schedule' was very hard on me postpartum because I didn't expect how much not having office work or coworkers was going to be on me. The baby thing felt more lonely and forced. But I made changes after that! I started working for myself, making more things I had put off for "one day" and that would not have transpired if I just went back to the same work. When the pandemic came years later, I was sort of prepared to focus once again on things we had 'put off'. It seems cruel though that the only time our society got lately to re-examine their lives was a worldwide pandemic.
You are in a different stage, Courtney. Even now, on your sabbatical, you are still in the middle of that incredible, rich, exhausting, 100% demanding job of parenting young children. Those are tough (and wonderful) years. It's like running a marathon every day. In the myopia of child raising demands, I didn't see that there was a lot of life that would happen after that.
Two months off (without plans!) sounds dreamy. I was traveling for most of July, and while that's inspiring in other ways, the idea of spending un-scheduled time at home, quietly reading, gardening, cooking, and taking long walks is my idea of a perfect sabbatical. I did take a break from my newsletter while I was away, and now I'm refreshed and energized to start again (with lots of new themes to explore). I read The Creative Act this summer and Enchantment is up next! Happy to have your writing and beautiful reflections back in my inbox this week.
I'm so glad you took time off! I took a 3 month sabbatical for the first time ever in 2021, and then another 3 month sabbatical in 2022, and ohhhh goodness did I start feeling my feelings more. It is extremely relatable when you talk about how work allows us to emotionally bypass. So much emerged from the depths when I didn't have the constant white noise of emails, Slack, and social media. Thank you for these reflections. It's so important to talk about rest. It's a privilege and luxury but if we can afford to do it, a sabbatical can rewire our brains and bodies.
When I first discovered Wintering in 2021 (through the On Being podcast) a lightbulb went off for me. Living for 15 years in the excessively abundant NorCal sunshine, my body forgot how to settle. Growing up in the midwest, where it’s below zero for long stretches, sunshine meant productivity. Constant sun=burnout. But my body learned to rest in the midwest, too. I took Katherine May’s message to heart and let myself lean into stillness, which had evaded me for much too long.
(P.S. consider adding Dacher Keltner’s “Awe” to your booklist.)
I just returned from six weeks in Iceland where I was on an artist residency for four weeks and traveling the other two.
My mind gave me the gift of a whole new direction in my art. My heart helped me see the behaviors of my travel companion as annoying and challenging and too familiar. That helped me detach from them and learn about myself and how to respond in ways that felt right to me. TIME allowed me that wisdom.
I had time to sit in the meadow in the mountain behind my home and pick blueberries and feel the mystical energy of the Earth penetrate everything within me and re-set it.
I’m back home now, preparing to teach again (something I love to do), missing the connection I have to Iceland, getting back to my distractions, but with anticipation of making it to the studio shortly where I have paintings to paint!
I take this time away every year (except during Covid) and know it helps me be who I am meant to be.
I haven't take a sabbatical, maybe not since maternity leave 30 years ago. But I have taken all social media off my cell phone for the last two years. And I try to remind myself to just be. Stay outside on a star-shot night and watch the moon rise. Notice beauty. Appreciate others, and the world. I am glad you hit the brakes on the "hectivity" of your life. You need it. It is good for you, the kids, and your co-workers. You got a break and everyone probably appreciated your extraordinary presence all the more. Welcome back.
"Hectivity" - great word.
Ah, you bring back so many memories with your honest, heart-full post, Courtney. Thank you for your insight and openness to this experience.
As college faculty, I was able to take a sabbatical in 2013-2014. It was the happiest year of my life. It started with dropping our youngest child off at college and then returning to our empty house to begin the process of rediscovering my spouse. We spent time alone together, had leisurely dinners or spent Saturdays in the garden. We deepened our relationship, catching up after our 22 hectic years of raising children. My daughter, calling home from college, quipped, "Instead of empty nest, it sounds like love nest over there!" I missed my children, but I had really missed my spouse, and even more, myself.
Perhaps the most incredible thing about this time was I spent it training for and walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain. I had been diagnosed 15 years earlier with a degenerative nerve disease that would slowly take away my ability to walk or use my hands. I was angry and grieving about how this was playing out in my numb feet, deteriorating muscles and terrible balance, and I wanted to take some time to figure out how I was going to integrate this disease into my reality, and not just resent and hate it. So I trained, sometimes with wonderful, supportive friends, but mostly alone, first walking 3-5 miles a day and working up to 15 miles a day with a full pack. I walked in beautiful places, sang, reflected, sobbed, prayed, listened to inspiring writers. After 9 months, I flew to Spain and did my solitary walk, every day relishing that I could do it and feeling deep gratitude for life and for the gift of this year of sabbatical. I found a kind of grace about my disease; it became a kind of teacher and friend. This time off changed my life. I hope the same for you.
WOW, this is incredible on multiple levels. I am in such a different stage of parenting life, but so love this vision to hold in my head when things get tough, chaotic, disconnected. Thank you. And what a beautiful ritual you created for yourself. So moving.
OMG this is so great. Love this line: "I missed my children, but I had really missed my spouse, and even more, myself."
Hmm.. this is really interesting. I've been pretending that I'm on a sabbatical, but I'm not. I'm just sick.
But I can relate to aspects of this. I especially like the line about getting to "tend to my physical world, my forgotten desires, my body’s natural pace". There's an aspect to being sick that makes doing the some of the things you want to do impossible, so the process of tending to your desires involves a lot of listening without acting. But I find that even listening to my deepest hopes and desires changes me/my perspective even if I can't act on them now. Hopefully I will when the illness ends at some indeterminate future time.
I have stepped back from all work and worry about productivity because the doctors say that I need the rest. So the space that is left is somewhat similar except that I fill my time with a lot less. A lot of medicines, medical logistics, laying in bed both asleep and not quite but mostly asleep. I read very slowly but I do get to read. And lately I struggle to walk. But I am learning how to appreciate nature even when I'm slow- watching neighborhood phoebes nest and teach their young how to fly or a brood of ground hogs grow up and terrorize the neighborhood gardens. And recently I failed dramatically at going to a museum (too much walking!) but there is also something fantastic about sitting and focusing on a single painting or work of art for a long while (on a bench).
Realistically there's a limit to how much intention I can bring to my own period on pause. Sometimes pain or some other medical indignity hits and all I can do is turn to movies or silly things to take my attention away from the intensity of the physical experience. I am learning that I am loved by the people in my life even if I've slept for half of the day or the only thing I managed to do was take my medicine and do the dishes, that I am loved independently of what I produce, which I never really understood the way I do now.
I really hate being sick. But I do notice that being forced to stop completely for a long period (3+ months in, who knows how much more) has opened up my perspective. Even if I'm the only twenty year old in a tiny town hanging out with the sixty year olds!
Oh hp, I am so moved by this. Thank you for being honest about your real experience (highs, lows, and in betweens) and modeling such grace for all of us. I have some family members who have longterm chronic illnesses so this feels very close to my heart. Wishing you healing and a steady heart in the meantime.
Wayne Muller has a lovely book titled "Sabbath" that speaks to the need for these kind of experiences, and provides ideas for doing them in smaller bites, incorporating them in "everyday life." It's been indispensable for my wife and I -- bringing us back to ourselves and our human scale over and over again.
YES! I really want to integrated little tastes of my sabbatical into my "regular" schedule. This is good inspiration.
Love this Courtney - Our sabbaticals coincided. I also love making weird art and letting my mind wander without an agenda. I was surprised to realize that having let go of some of the emotional weight of my full time job, I was able to be WAY more present, engaged and energized by what was right in front of me....my family, my community, nature, food, and the chance to move my body. I also love my work but not at the expense of fully enjoying those must-haves.
So excited to hear you took some time off. Good for you!! I'm one month into an "unplanned sabbatical" after getting laid off. Decided to take a much-needed mental break for a couple months before starting to search for something new. You nailed it with your takeaways #1 and #2 - couldn't agree more!
Congratulations on your paddle boarding triumph! The reading list is formidable and commendable! I’d like to add Matthew Desmond, “Poverty, By America.”
It opens with this excellent quote from Tolstoy: “We imagine that their sufferings are one thing and our life another”. Its thesis is that poverty in the U.S. persists because the rest of us benefit from it.
Desmond is an esteemed professor of sociology at Princeton and the book is packed with data to show that America is the richest country on earth with more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why and how do we tolerate such egregious inequality? DD
I am glad you had this opportunity to grow, Courtney, and I am glad to have you back. Retirement was my first sabbatical, and you nail most of what it has been like. Thanks for the book recommendations. Here are some of mine: Chloe Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty; Laurie Frankl, This is How It Always Is; Fredrik Backman, Britt-Marie Was Here; Elizabeth Strout, Olive, Again; Liane Moriarty, Apples Never Fall; Caitlin Moran, More than a Woman; Sarah Winman, Still Life. Go from strength to strength, dear Courtney.
Love these recs! Easy Beauty was one of my faves from last year.
Welcome back.
Upon the births of my first and third children, I took a couple of years off of work, making it just family time. And as a teacher I typically had a change of pace in summer. That change in routine, with an absence of deliverables or a clock that required me to be somewhere at a particular time, were helpful in resetting and noticing things that were always there but out of focus.
Now in my life, because of caretaking for loved ones who will need it even after I am gone, I have no sabbaticals in store.
For those of us for whom a sabbatical per se is not in the cards, it is important to find other forms of sanctuary and to be serious about embracing a rhythm of life that leaves regular space.
I am all for artistic adventures! I have some water color materials in view waiting for my chance. Usually I paint in acrylics, things that take maybe a couple of days each.
"For those of us for whom a sabbatical per se is not in the cards, it is important to find other forms of sanctuary and to be serious about embracing a rhythm of life that leaves regular space." Yes! I really feel this. Sabbaticals are like going sober for our busyness and we need more titrated ways of living the essence of them--lives that match our capacity for productivity, relationships, wonder, creativity etc.
Welcome back, we missed you as well!
The only times I have had like that was after baby and then the pandemic. Both times - everything sort of just stopped and I made way for things that mattered more to me. This sort of 'clearing of the schedule' was very hard on me postpartum because I didn't expect how much not having office work or coworkers was going to be on me. The baby thing felt more lonely and forced. But I made changes after that! I started working for myself, making more things I had put off for "one day" and that would not have transpired if I just went back to the same work. When the pandemic came years later, I was sort of prepared to focus once again on things we had 'put off'. It seems cruel though that the only time our society got lately to re-examine their lives was a worldwide pandemic.
You are in a different stage, Courtney. Even now, on your sabbatical, you are still in the middle of that incredible, rich, exhausting, 100% demanding job of parenting young children. Those are tough (and wonderful) years. It's like running a marathon every day. In the myopia of child raising demands, I didn't see that there was a lot of life that would happen after that.
Two months off (without plans!) sounds dreamy. I was traveling for most of July, and while that's inspiring in other ways, the idea of spending un-scheduled time at home, quietly reading, gardening, cooking, and taking long walks is my idea of a perfect sabbatical. I did take a break from my newsletter while I was away, and now I'm refreshed and energized to start again (with lots of new themes to explore). I read The Creative Act this summer and Enchantment is up next! Happy to have your writing and beautiful reflections back in my inbox this week.
I'm so glad you took time off! I took a 3 month sabbatical for the first time ever in 2021, and then another 3 month sabbatical in 2022, and ohhhh goodness did I start feeling my feelings more. It is extremely relatable when you talk about how work allows us to emotionally bypass. So much emerged from the depths when I didn't have the constant white noise of emails, Slack, and social media. Thank you for these reflections. It's so important to talk about rest. It's a privilege and luxury but if we can afford to do it, a sabbatical can rewire our brains and bodies.
Paddle boarding on the river sounds great!
Welcome back, Courtney. 🫶🏼
When I first discovered Wintering in 2021 (through the On Being podcast) a lightbulb went off for me. Living for 15 years in the excessively abundant NorCal sunshine, my body forgot how to settle. Growing up in the midwest, where it’s below zero for long stretches, sunshine meant productivity. Constant sun=burnout. But my body learned to rest in the midwest, too. I took Katherine May’s message to heart and let myself lean into stillness, which had evaded me for much too long.
(P.S. consider adding Dacher Keltner’s “Awe” to your booklist.)
YES, such a good point about the weather and how it orients our activity. I did so much "wintering" this summer in the Bay.
I understand!
I just returned from six weeks in Iceland where I was on an artist residency for four weeks and traveling the other two.
My mind gave me the gift of a whole new direction in my art. My heart helped me see the behaviors of my travel companion as annoying and challenging and too familiar. That helped me detach from them and learn about myself and how to respond in ways that felt right to me. TIME allowed me that wisdom.
I had time to sit in the meadow in the mountain behind my home and pick blueberries and feel the mystical energy of the Earth penetrate everything within me and re-set it.
I’m back home now, preparing to teach again (something I love to do), missing the connection I have to Iceland, getting back to my distractions, but with anticipation of making it to the studio shortly where I have paintings to paint!
I take this time away every year (except during Covid) and know it helps me be who I am meant to be.
Amazing Susan! I had new eyes in my old landscape but I can imagine having new eyes in a new landscape would also be transformational.
So true. Iceland in particular feels like the place my heart and body are most at home so I am immediately transformed as soon as I touch town there.