My sabbatical starts Feb 1. I will be leaving straight from New Orleans on a work meetup to fly back to Seattle, hang at the airport, and then board a plane to San Diego with my partner. I plan to start the first two weeks both rigidly and free:
- No phone
- No caffeine
- No computer (except for a zoom call with pals one night)
- Meditate
- Read
- Work out
- Postcards/card writing
- Journal
- Cook
- Take photos
A pal I met in San Diego started Passion Planner so, ahead of the trip, I purchased both an empty journal and a poem journal with prompts. I’ve written down the above in the journal along with some mantras for meditation and some important dates/times where I actually need to be somewhere. In the next few days, I’ll write down more that comes to me. I have tried to write slowly and carefully, my terrible handwriting more of a hazard than a proper communication device.
As the days wind down, I both can’t wait and already miss so much. Listening to music, listening to audiobooks, listening to podcasts, reading the news, quickly texting friends, snapping photos, sending and receiving audio messages, knowing the time, checking my finances, on and on. My partner and I have been plotting how we’ll handle this time. She’ll order lyft rides (I’ll reimburse later), help me tell the time for important events, and look things up on Google maps as needed. I wonder how long it’ll take my brain to stop trying to multitask, for my hands to stop reaching into my pocket to check my phone, my ears to have renewed appreciation for the background music that occupies so many spaces, my curiosity to return to the joy of wondering rather than the satisfaction of looking something up, and my soul to miss people so much that scribbling down postcards won’t scratch the itch of hearing someone’s voice. I expect the first few days to be adventure, the days after that to be a solid and hard crash, and, hopefully, the days following to be ones of renewal.
Could I bring a walkman or a simple watch? I could. I don’t want to though. I want it to be a reset, to be jarring, and to lead to a deprivation in certain ways of being to leave room for a return and a start of other ways of being.
agm 
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