[BIFFS Vol. 3] On fun-employment, sabbaticals and seasons of change
A love letter to all my friends crawling out of the matrix
This is part of my sporadic series, Big Ideas from Small Sabbatical (or “BIFSS” for short, because I like making up words). You might want to pair this with any of these other volumes:
January 4, 2023
I’m taking a sabbatical. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but a few months ago when I stepped away from my work, I knew I couldn’t possibly just move on to The Next Thing. As I mull over how to spend my days for the next few months, I thought I’d share a real-time log of how it’s going.
I have a terrible tendency to only share neatly packaged, outdated versions of myself with the world, so it’s a good exercise in processing the here and now. And finally, if anything, regular writing is a habit worth cultivating.
What to do when you’re figuring out what to do
Some time in 2022, my friend Raya Ward asked me quite bluntly, “What do you want to dedicate your twenties to?”
Her innocent inquiry left me stunned. Since then, it has literally kept me up at night. It’s a question that won’t go away as an uncanny number of friends, for a variety of reasons, seem to have found themselves in some form of fun-employment, sabbatical or break – call it what you will. Our stories are varied – post-IPO freedom to de-prioritize running the rat race, caught in the crossfires of Elon Musk’s Twitter rampage, H1B visa woes, and the natural consequence of macro-economic downturn.
Most of us are in our twenties. And in my circle, most of us are women. So what do you do when you’re figuring out what to do?
It will be a dance with uncertainty. Embrace that.
A few years ago, I’d be freaking out right now. But this time round, it feels pleasantly exciting, like designing my own experiment where the only goal is to figure out how I want to live.
I think there’s something important about learning to rest in liminal spaces, because it forces you to become comfortable with making meaning regardless of external circumstances. When you take away the artificial pressure to choose Next, you find that you are not on a linear path but meandering through an open field where gardens can be grown.
So what, actually, is a sabbatical? And how is it changing?
“Sabbatical” is a rather lofty word. For me it elicits notions of middle aged white men who quit their intense, well-paying jobs – possibly as a faculty member at some prestigious institution of learning – move their families to the woods for some months, and return to the world with fresh ideas which will shortly be expounded on a Tim Ferris episode.
But going on sabbatical at 24 is very different from going on sabbatical at 42. And I think that going on sabbatical as a young woman is also very different from going on sabbatical wearing any other hat. Our culture simply does not have a blueprint for this. The closest I’ve observed is friends who are software engineers who quit their jobs to tinker around for a few months, usually with a nice cushion of Silicon Valley savings that makes the whole affair rather… unchallenging.
To understand what a sabbatical is, let us return to the root of the word: Sabbath. For this, I highly recommend two books by Abraham Joshua Heschel: God in Search for Man and The Sabbath.
Sabbatical is ultimately an extended ritual of rest and reflection. Those of us who embark on it tend to do so because we’ve been pretty sloppy at taking Sabbath in our own lives – not the Jewish holy day, but rather the metaphorical Sabbath - those regular moments in our day, and days in our week, where we reflect a little more deeply on this human existence.
Perhaps begin here
Over the last few months, whenever I’ve told people that I am on creative sabbatical – something I'm still figuring out how to define for myself – 9 times out of 10, the next question is something along the lines of "Cool, so what will you do next?"
But I would not be on creative sabbatical if I knew what came next. In fact, the whole point of carving out this widow is to imbue meaning into what should otherwise be a very stressful time. It also gives me a label with which to signal that meaning to others. And in times of uncertainty, meaning-making is the most valuable tool in the box.
How we talk about our experience, the daily habits we form to relate to ourselves in new ways – all of these are powerful ways to catalyze one's own transformation.
Many times during this process, it’s been tempting to mentally race ahead of myself, to make plans and even willfully succumb to the gripping anxiety around what I "do" with my life. Yet, deep down, my body's own knowing forces me to pause and be content in this season of the Interim. It is a visceral knowing in which there is strange comfort, one found only by crossing the bridge of surrender.
Each time I’ve felt that sense of panic around what I will be doing 2 months from now, how I will financially support myself 4 months from now, I remind myself that this ambiguity is precisely the lesson. I can choose to spend my sabbatical worrying about what's next or I can choose to widen my present moment awareness.
So how different might everything feel when each period of stillness, acceleration, dullness, anguish, joy, sadness is taken for what it is – a necessary part of the human experience?
And now, finally, Rilke – on learning to see life through the lens of seasons:
How dear you will be to me then, you nights
of anguish. Why didn’t I kneel more deeply to accept you,
inconsolable sisters, and surrendering, lose myself
in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though they are really
our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen,
one season in our inner year –, not only a season
in time –, but are place and settlement, foundation and soil and home.
Loving the insights into your current thoughts. This perspective- an uncertain one- is refreshingly honest. Can't wait for the next volume.