Sabbatical
Having the luxury to take a sabbatical is a wonderful thing.
For me, I reached a point where it was clear I wasn't really following my heart when it came to my work. I actually have had the luck of having a wonderful career working with even more wonderful people. Despite this, I still would reach a place where I felt stuck, unfulfilled, and would create my own tension and stories to explain why the job was not for me anymore. Only with my most recent job did I recognize that it was all my own creation. It forced me to really look at my conditioned and unconscious behavior. Thus, the sabbatical.
I can't say anything truly new or profound has come of my time to think and process. Really, it seems most if not all of life's problems have been answered in some way by philosophers and spiritual teachers of the past. In any case, there are a few quips and viewpoints that exemplify the experience I've had. I aim to collect them here and update this as my views change and experience continues to unfold.
As I've been making sense of my situation I've found that writing has been a necessity. It seems I don't actually know what I'm thinking unless I write.
It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
—Wendell Berry
I don’t know what I’m doing. And if you don’t know what to do, there’s actually a chance of doing something new. As long as you know what you’re doing, nothing much of interest is going to happen.
—Philip Glass
Developing tenderness towards yourself allows you to see both your problems and your potential accurately. You don’t feel that you have to ignore your problems or exaggerate your potential.
—Chögyam Trungpa
It doesn’t matter how sensitive you are or how damn smart and educated you are, if you’re not both at the same time, if your heart and your brain aren’t connected, aren’t working together harmoniously, well, you’re just hopping through life on one leg. You may think you’re walking, you may think you’re running a damn marathon, but you’re only on a hop trip. The connections gotta be maintained.
—Tom Robbins
Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on... So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything... The answer, then, must not deal with goals at all... We do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES. But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that we can’t BE firemen, bankers, or doctors...but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal... Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life.
—Hunter S. Thompson
To gain your own voice,
—Allen Ginsberg
forget about having it heard.
Become a saint of
your own province
and your own consciousness.
To make living itself an art, that is the goal.
—Henry Miller