Last week was my first week back at work after a glorious three month sabbatical. During my time off, I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to bring with me from sabbatical life to working life because I wasn’t sure what might fall away when I started working again.
After only one week, it became obvious what disappeared as soon as I started working again: my ability to be present in my personal life. On sabbatical I paid attention to the world around me. I paid attention to the sweet taste and creamy texture of my overnight oats. I paid attention to the wet green scent of the Appalachian air when I walked. I paid attention to the cardinals and finches and blue jays at our feeder, I laughed at the gallumphing groundhog in the garden, I stood in the water at the end of my swim lane with goggles on my head and talked to other swimmers at the pool, I pulled out my notebook every morning and at every café, and sometimes in the afternoon, and sometimes in the evening, and I wrote.
This week, when I wasn’t at work, I frequently found myself either scrolling mindlessly or thinking about work. When I walked. When I swam. When I ate my breakfast. When I opened my notebook and wrote to-do lists instead of journaling my thoughts. I struggled to apply my brain to anything outside of work.
It only took two or three days for me to recognize this stark difference to when I was on sabbatical. I realized that slowing down and being present were the most beautiful part of my time off.
This is a thing I wish we valued more as a society: to slow down and pay attention to the miracle of being alive. Why do we have to move so fast? Why do we have to maximize productivity? What is the end goal of this go go go pace? Is that really what living is all about? We lean into technology to make us faster and more efficient, so that we can do more more more with less less less, and particularly now we’re doing that with AI. I just reread The Handmaid’s Tale, and in it, one of the ways to signal your virtue and status in the social order is to buy prayers. But you’re not even paying humans to pray for you. Instead, you dial a number, pay a fee, and a computer will type and print a prayer for you. The Soul Scrolls, they’re called. A room full of computers printing computer-generated prayers into an empty room with no humans in it. Is this where we’re going? Where’s the soul in that?
Ideally, we would use the time we gain from technology to enrich our lives rather than just filling the expanded space with more productivity. Or if we are productive, we use our attention to produce something beautiful:
Maybe the desire to make something beautiful
is the piece of God that is inside each of us.– Mary Oliver, “Franz Marc’s Blue Horses”
If we’re intentional about how we use our time, I think we can get there. This is my ambition now that I’m back at work. Being present is the thing I want to carry over from my sabbatical.
Thankfully, being present is not a thing that requires time off from work. It does take effort in my personal life at the end of an 8-hour day of concentrated work-focus, the residue of which carries over into non-work hours. It takes attention.
By the second half of my first week back, I felt myself able to pay attention to small moments and tap into that same satisfaction I felt on sabbatical. I soaked in the laughter with colleagues and the satisfaction of writing documentation at work. I savored the silky texture of goat cheese and golden sweetness of honey after a simple dinner of an earthy Chilean wine, pesto-dolloped chickpea flatbread, and smoked salmon over greens. On Friday, I treated myself to working from a coffee shop. I sipped a frothy cappuccino while I tapped on my laptop, like all the other remote workers I’d observed while on sabbatical, and delighted in being in the cozy and social space.
At the end of the workday on Friday, I felt like I was getting back into the swing of things at work. I felt good about catching up, and getting stuff done, and having an idea of where to go next.
At the end of the workday on Friday, the weekend began, and after three months of practice, I was able to slip back into being present in my personal life almost instantly. My husband and I walked to a local Brazilian restaurant for dinner. We sat at a high top table next to where the owners presided at the grill, the husband in a flat top cap and the wife surveying the restaurant to make sure everyone was well cared for. We laughed with each other, chatted with our server, and lingered with red wine, appetizers of cheese-stuffed tapioca dice and gorgonzola-stuffed polenta with Chimichurri sauce, main dishes of kielbasa and grilled zucchini with guava sauce, dessert of sugar-sprinkled plantains over salted caramel ice cream, and coffee to end the night. We admired the colorful abstract art on the walls and talked with the owners about where it came from (the husband’s mother painted them all). My heart (and stomach) was full and happy as we walked home under clouds painted salmon pink by the sunset.
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.-Mary Oliver, “Sometimes”
Butterfly Mind 