A great joy for me right now is that I can swim at 8am instead of 5:30am since I don’t have to squeeze my laps in before work. I reserve my lane for a whole hour instead of 30 minutes, too, which means that I can mix things up, add more exercises, and take my time with my workouts. I can do kick sets, which are slow, so I never use the kick board in my 30 minute swims. I can also add longer rests after sprints. This felt like a luxury yesterday — to rest 30 seconds instead of 10 — and I was shocked by the results. By adding rest between sprints, I dropped 6 seconds on each all-out effort. After a longer rest, I swam stronger and faster. There is likely a lesson in this, if one wants to swim stronger and faster.

Similarly, with the time affluence I find myself with, I feel very little compulsion to run for exercise. I’d rather go for a long walk and listen to birds, or listen to short stories. When I have a job to go to every day, time is my scarcest resource. It has now occurred to me that I run because running is a fast, efficient workout, not because I actually like it. I do, however, actually like walking. When I’m walking, I feel present. I notice things. I check on the progress of the peonies in the neighborhood, I smell roses, I pay attention to the scent of sunlight on pine needles. Tomorrow I can hike in the the woods with our daughter.

When I’m working, I squeeze in one journal page per day if I’m lucky. I may blog once every two weeks. On sabbatical I get to write as much as I want, and that ends up being a lot. I blog multiple times a week. I keep a daily sabbatical journal handmade by my friend Pam that includes 2 pages per day and some sketches. I do morning pages — 3 pages of non-stop brain dump. On some days I do an additional 3 pages of exploratory writing.

This morning when I looked out the window at my poppies, whose buds look like they are going to burst open into flame red flowers any day now, I thought, “Oh, I want to journal about those!” What will I write about them? Who knows! But I had a moment of lucidity about why I love writing and journaling. It’s not just a way to discover what I think, or to clarify my thinking. It’s not just a way to be present in the moment by paying close attention to sensory details. It is both of those things, yes, and much more. But what struck me as I thought about my poppies is that writing is a way of being friends with myself. When I write, I can say whatever I want without worrying about whether it’s interesting or how someone else might respond. Maybe all I’ll journal about the poppies is that I love them, their weird hairy plump buds, their ridiculously bright petals, the thrilling anticipation of waiting for them to open. It doesn’t matter what I write: I can put my thoughts on a page without worry about being boring or having any purpose in what I’m saying.

Maybe later in my sabbatical I’ll care about improving my writing, but maybe I won’t! I was interested that my swim sprint got faster, but that was a just a side effect of the thing that I was actually excited about: I liked the luxury of the longer rest. I thought I’d want to spend time on sabbatical improving my craft(s), but pushing to always be faster, better, stronger is exhausting. I like this life of leisure. I’m leaning more now towards just writing (and swimming, and walking) for the joy of it, as a way of being friends with myself.