Why I am taking a sabbatical
In the middle of April I started a five-month pause from my work at Friends of the Earth — and I will be returning to my role in our Experiments Team in September. The first two weeks felt familiar, like a holiday. I walked a section of the Pembrokeshire coast path with my sister, and for nearly three weeks we were fortunate to host a continuous stream of friends and family, staying for between a night and 5–6 days (and what a joy to be able to do this again). So it’s only really this week that I have sat down to realise what this stretch of time means, and how I want to be present in it and how to talk about it.
First of all, it is an incredible gift. To be fortunate enough to be able to manage financially for this period, to have an employer willing to offer it and not to have hanging over me the shadow of job-hunting is an extraordinary opportunity. And with that good fortune comes a pressure to ‘make the most of it’. That pressure has even translated into writing this blog post: I have been mulling this over for weeks, and have been putting it off, I think because I feared I wouldn’t be able to tell a compelling enough story, or honour the opportunity. Oliver Burkeman (more from him below) has refreshing things to say on this subject however:
“If you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax — because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job. So you might as well make a start.” (Four Thousand Weeks, p.80)
So, here’s why — what I plan to do with the time, and what might sabotage it (a nudge to self as much as anything).
First, a bit of scene-setting. I love my job. Not every moment of it, of course, but sometimes I still have to pinch myself that I get to explore new ideas about how to build a fairer, better world for a living. But doing it well requires my imagination to flourish, and that, as Rob Hopkins has explored so brilliantly, requires certain conditions to be in place. There are the material conditions, but there is also the exposure to a wide range of influences, people and stimuli. A new idea is often little more than the joining together of existing ideas in new combinations, the forming of new (neural) pathways between existing elements. During the last two+ years, my world (like many people’s) shrunk dramatically, often to the size of the small screen in front of me. I found myself working alone from home, almost all the time and with a diminishing number of colleagues (all for good reasons). I was never ‘burnt out’ — I was too well supported for that to be true — but I felt myself shrinking too: in my imagination, my confidence, my sense of agency, my creativity. And as my world has opened back up there is immense pressure to be back to full pace. But we are not going back, we are adapting to a fundamentally changed set of circumstances and before I dive back in I need to understand what are the practices and the ways of working that will enable me to thrive in a new world. I needed to pause, and to be more intentional about how I will work.
The idea of the sabbatical — the pause — as a tool for a professional reset has been around for a while. I owe my initial thinking about it to Dan Pink’s writing about Stefan Sagmeister (2009!), and certainly I long ago abandoned a conventional notion of the learn / work / retire model (which I still find predominant in Gen X). I have no expectations about ‘retirement’ — the idea that that will be a meaningful concept in the climate-ravaged 2040s/50s seems profoundly deluded — but that prompts a different perspective on the arc of our precious four thousand weeks (or so). More recently, in The Future We Choose, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Christiana Figueres make the case for those whose work involves looking the climate and ecological crises in the eye, day after day (and shouldn’t that be everyone?), to take extended breaks in their career where they are reconnect with nature. This resonated with me (although I am under no illusions about the pressure or value of my work next to theirs and their peers). This work — as we all know by now — is a marathon not a sprint, and rest is one of the most important components of ‘training’.
But what next? I am still figuring this out, but Satish Kumar’s trinity of ‘soil, soul, society’ feels like a useful framework.
- Tending to the soil
There’s a physical, practical component to this: getting my hands dirty on our community allotment and in the garden. I am a (slightly) reluctant gardener. I fully embrace the theory of connecting with my local patch of earth, I’m even an accredited and trained conservation leader with the city council and I am increasingly fascinated by the science of it (fungi!) but I often feel a mix of frustration and discomfort in actually doing it. (My broad beans all die, I don’t know where to start, I have an aversion to the ways in which gardening can feel like another form of shopping, I find it hard to shrug off the notion that I could be being more ‘productive’ doing something else). So this is a chance to lean into that discomfort, to discover what I learn about myself in the process, and to explore my relationship with the other-than-humans around me.
Some of this soil is also a little bit more metaphorical: what about the soil of my own every day life? What am I rooted in, and from what do I derive my energy, what are the conditions that enable me to thrive? We have a beautiful home — but it needs some attention in order to make it better able to nurture the life we want to lead. In particular, we don’t the right space set up for creative / making practices. So there’s some decorating and sorting to do: and doing this work alongside parenting, and with an ethos of material reuse and minimum impact takes time. I realise that I feel apologetic writing this, that it feels trivial. But I also know that not attending to it over time causes lots of frustration and unnecessary tension.
2. Nourishing the soul
I mean soul in the broadest sense. What are the activities and practices that bring me joy in the world and how can I nurture them? What can I do to enhance my sense of wonder and cultivate wildness? I’m not quite sure what path this will take, but it is about openness to stimuli — and to embodied experience. It will also involve (lots of) cycling. This is the part that is about creative recovery and reset — and that is necessarily non-prescriptive. It’s also about finding and cultivating the right spiritual practices that will sustain me for the times ahead.
3. Embracing society: on being and doing in relation with others
This — after all — is what it’s all for. How can I use this time to equip myself to take more responsibility for our collective future? How can I make sure that my contributions are sustainable in the longer term (once I return to work)? I am fortunate in that, professionally at least, I already have a unique role to play — I don’t need to spend this time figuring that out. So who is pushing the boundaries of innovation for climate and ecological justice, how are they working and what can I learn from and with them? And how can I make sure that I have a sustaining network around me? Can I find new mentors, for example? For this is not work to be done in isolation.
Increasingly I feel that the years to come will be about ‘staying with the trouble’ — about how we respond and react in a world ‘beyond hope’, or at least as NGOs in their cheerier climate-optimist modes have tended to frame it (and I’m not alone in this — for example listen to episode 148 of ‘All That We Are’, previously ‘The Future is Beautiful’, which explores this reframing). At the end of last year I started to develop a framework for thinking about sustaining community in this context, and I’ll be looking to stress-test this as a way of understanding community (including / especially my own immediate neighbourhood) — the assets we have, the capacities we need to develop and what it might mean to be readier for this.
There’s a lot in here. That’s OK. I don’t expect to do it all — and I want to leave room for emergence. But it is important to think hard about what could get in the way. I’ve spotted two big things so far.
The first is my ambivalence about my own finitude, as Oliver Burkeman explores it. I’ve already observed an assumption amongst some friends and acquaintances that I must have loads of time on my hands and that therefore I must have ‘more time’ for x. Saying no in this context is uncomfortable: I can’t use the excuse of work, all I can truthfully say is “I care more about other things right now.” In addition, I need to learn to say no not just to the things I don’t want to do but — this is the really hard bit — the things I do really want to do, in the recognition that this time will only come round once (so for example, I probably can’t attend every talk / gig / event etc. I’d like to, even if I could afford to). (“But surely that’s what this time’s for?” says the little voice in my head…)
The second is the willingness to accept discomfort. In his chapter ‘The Intimate Interrupter’ (a quote from Mary Oliver), Oliver Burkeman writes compellingly about the mystery of why, even doing the things we know we want to do, can feel so hard. How we are always seeking distraction from the tasks in hand, especially those that make us confront our own finitude. I recognise this. It would be the easiest thing in the world for me to spend the next 4.5 months sitting at a computer, reading lots of interesting things, descending into Twitter-holes and writing thoughtful Medium posts. Much easier than digging over the compost, for example. Maybe setting this out here will help guard against this.
Burkeman (drawing on James Hollis) advocates asking of every decision: “does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?” Taking a sabbatical is a deliberate choice towards enlargement. But the choice is not made once-and-for all — it’s going to be a daily practice.
