If you have followed this blog over a period of time you would remember that I had three ‘full-blown sabbatical periods’ the last of which ended in February 2019.
It started in December 2016 running into 2017 when I had the real ‘true sabbatical’ where I walked out of work on the 20th December and left my phone and my laptop there.
I even bought a small little 'brick’ phone and was pretty much entirely off the grid for six weeks until February.
I tried to write and publish the blog on a daily basis through that but in the end I stopped and completely shut down.
I wrote to myself in my diary that I’d be more contented at the end of that period than I had ever known.
So, last week after working pretty much everyday to some degree or another I decided to have a three day sabbatical, shutting down at the end of the Business Course on Friday night and giving myself a little break from as much of this as I could until Tuesday morning.
Still produced some blogs and in truth cleared an inbox of emails but nothing else.
It’s important to pull yourself away from the incessant urge to work all the time just to ‘try and make it better’.
That is a fools game because much of the stuff that you work on now will be obsolete or useless by the time that we get back to work (and I’m talking about Dentists here).
Sure, there is preparation of some sort or another that can be done and should be done but there is probably about 80% of the work that you would like to do which will not really be any use when you get to the other side.
The sabbatical didn’t remove the episodic anxiety that we are all feeling (and some are better at talking about it than others) and it didn’t remove the uncertainty or the unknown of what is to come next.
Although it did give me a little bit of space just to look up and to see the things that are really important to me and to be glad that they’re ok.
We will all be sad and anxious and upset for many months to come in different degrees.
While there are the odd people who’s businesses are booming or have so much money in the bank that they can just ‘ride it out happily’, there are many people in the middle ground who don’t know what the future holds when they felt 8 weeks ago that they did.
The time away from the Grindstone, I’m just trying to make things happen in my world where not much is happening is special because I don’t want to get to a year from now and feel like I have missed a year of my life.
So I refocused on my training plan again and set a target for the end of this week.
While I haven’t used my time in lockdown as productively as one might imagine, I’m fitter than I was last year (based on a computer programme anyway) but at least that’s something to celebrate.
Blog Post Number - 2372
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