I’m 12 days into an 80 day sabbatical and this is the fifth time I’ve done something like this and I’m beginning to understand the format.
Many of us realise that it takes a period of time when we’re on holiday to ‘decompress’ before we start to relax and feel like you’re properly on holiday and before (we hope) we feel ready to return to work.
I’m 12 days in and I haven’t finished decompressing.
The first time I ever did anything like this was enforced quite some years ago when my dog was ill and I couldn’t go on holiday.
I was left all alone at home for a week and thought it would be the most amazing, cleansing and healthy experience of my life and it turned out to be a binge eating, binge film-watching catastrophe of time wasting.
It’s what my body craved, it’s what my mind needed, it’s was decompression and release and breaking of the habit of always needing to be busy.
The last 12 days have been just that.
I’m getting fatter and more unfit and less likely to be able hurt myself on a bike.
My mind has been closed and asleep and wasteful and inefficient and ineffective.
When people say “what are you going to do with your time off?”. You can dazzle them with all these grand plans to achieve this, that and the other but in reality the first period, at least, is just a big amorphous mass of jelly.
The difference is that it’s now Wednesday and I’m not back at work next week or the week after.
My mind is starting to feel better and more free with ideas and good thoughts and nice things popping up like little green shoots.
I’m not thinking about the day-to-day of work, I’m thinking more and more about the months and years that are hopefully to come.
The time off is such an enormous privilege to be able to take and feels like the work of so many people.
It feels like a responsibility that I have to keep to make the most of it and the best of it as a gratitude to the ability to have it.
The first thing to do though in these circumstances is to strip it back to zero and that, in itself, is probably the greatest gift of the time off that I could have.
Blog Post Number - 2962
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