When I left "an inside job" in the fall of 2009, I knew that my excitement and drive to reinvigorate the consulting business I had run for seven years would keep me busy. Soon my best friend was saying, "Whoah.. slow down." Her advice: "Jump off the wheel. Give yourself a break. You’ll be back on the wheel soon enough. Try a sabbatical. " She was so right. Just about this time last year, I jumped off.
It’s not surprising that my last post here was Aprjl 25, 2010. On April 15, I started a new job, after taking that sabbatical, and I've been pretty much head down ever since.
Now, as I take a deep breath the day after Thanksgiving, I give thanks for jumping off the wheel for several months in the winter of 2009/2010. It was the best gift I’ve ever given myself. And I know that without it, I probably would not have been ready to take the plunge I did in April (another "inside job" much to my surprise).
Taking sabbaticals is a lost art, except perhaps in academia, although usually a “to do” list goes along with the deal. A rarity in the corporate world. Only 19 companies on this list.
Taking that deep dive into a place of nonattachment to work was full of wonder and creativity. I loved it. I wrote poetry. And more poetry. I sat in silence. I spent time with my extended family. I enjoyed the highest snow fall on record. I stayed alone, for days at a time in a small cabin in the woods in the heart of winter. No sense of time. No agenda to meet. I rested and healed wounds I had found a way to hide. Mediation and Merton ("we cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time in the highest peak of intensity. Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony) were my guides. I listened hard to what I had long ago denied.
Sabbaticals are not for the cautious. It takes a degree of boldness to let go. To let go of the fear that your “place” won’t be there when you get back. To be willing to let go and find, maybe, a new place to be. It takes courage.
I think about my fellow comrades in the environmental community – now might be the time to consider jumping off the wheel. No chance of climate change legislation passing (That’s for another post). More gridlock to come for sure. So why not? Why not jump off the wheel. You just might be surprised about what you’ll learn about yourself, your job, what you may have hidden along the way.
For now, I’ll let Henri J.M.M. Nouwen close it out:
Without solitude there can be no real people. The more you discover what a person is, and experience what a human relationship requires in order to remain profound, fruitful, and a source of growth and development, the more you discover that you are alone – and that the measure of your solitude is the measure of your capacity for communion.
