My Sabbatical

Source: euart at flickr

If you are thinking about taking significant time away from work (or at least away from your usual work), it may be interesting to step back a little and see if you’re also thinking about making other changes to your life. Perhaps they’re related. Perhaps a trip is not just a trip, but a change in attitude.

The traditional way to live your life – as taught to us as children by our parents and by 1960′s TV shows – is that you go to school, meet a nice girl or boy, graduate, marry, have three kids, live in a nice white picket fence home, and work for 40 years until the age of 65, after which you promptly take up golf or knitting. Then you die, and people will remember you as… well, they will call you charming and sweet.

Anything that deviates from that plan, including taking one or more significant breaks from work to go backpack through Europe or live in the Australian outback, is considered a radical departure from the way you are supposed to do it. You get 3 weeks of vacation a year, and that’s the end of that. If you will stay 20 years, we will up it to 5 weeks. All subject to approval by your boss as long as no one else in your department has booked that time off already.

So the people that tend to take sabbaticals away from that traditional model, for instance by taking 2 years to travel from Alaska to Argentina by bicycle as a family, also tend to have other areas of their life they prefer to do differently that the norm too. Those people tend to be self-employed – sometimes through necessity, but mostly through the dislike of being told what to do and when. Six months in the south of Spain fades quickly away (to the point of disappearing from view) when you head back to work, and are working under intense deadlines, stress, working til midnight every night, working weekends, and generally counting the seconds to the next time you can go away.

Now there are people who like their regular jobs, who don’t feel it is such a burden or overly stressful, and that’s fine too. But consider this appropriate warning. My view is that there are three type of rats in the world: rats in a cage who don’t know they are in a cage, rats in a cage who know they are, and free rats. The worst off of the three is the second rat: being in a cage and knowing it. Once you spent a year being a free rat, you don’t want to go back in the cage. Another way to look at it, with less rat metaphors, is the movie The Matrix. Once you take the red pill, you are forever altered.

My view is that people who conciously choose to live life differently in this way – outside the traditional 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, 50 weeks a year, 40 years model – also are conscious about other things they do. They eat better, are a bit healthier than the general population. I’d love to see some research to back this up, and I am sure there are a fair number of people who do nothing but sit on a couch all day eating ice cream while they are off work. But to make this a conscious choice implies doing something other than nothing. Most workers don’t do anything during the week. They work, they go home and watch TV, they sleep. On the weekends, they go to the mall to buy stuff their kids don’t need.

Time away from work also implies free time to improve the other areas of your life. I have heard people say they have more time for family (parents, siblings, other relatives) when they are away then when they are at home. Certainly I called my own mother every week when we were in Spain last year, and sad to say only speak to her monthly when I am in the same city as her. I sent more catching up emails to friends too. Was more interactive online. Hopefully I was more interesting to them too!

It goes without saying having more time for your spouse and children strengthens that bond (for most, haha). And if you have room in your life for more friends, travelling can definitely broaden your friendship circle from your “school and work friends”, to “worldwide”. Which is a pretty big circle to draw from.

So once you start down this path, expect some unintended benefits. You may improve your work and career with a way to make as much as you did before with less work. You may improve your own budgeting and handling of money instead of wasting it. You may lose weight and get in better shape by eating better and being more active. You may strengthen your family ties and friendships since you are able to devote a bit more time to that.

So you may think all you are doing is planning your next long trip, but what you may be doing is changing your life.

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