There isn’t a rulebook for life. And I’m finding there also isn’t a rulebook for Sabbaticals. But then, we take Sabbaticals to relearn life.

I’m presently on a Sabbatical. As I prepared for my leave-taking, I made the early calculation not to prepare you for it. I mean, I prepared my family and friends, the church. But I mean you, reader of my blog. Some of the readers are family, friends, or church members, of course. But you know what I mean, right? I haven’t shared or named or offered an itinerary here. No expectations for what the coming months bring.

This was a conscious choice. I sat down to write about it and then chose not to. This was the week before, a few days into June, before we heard about concentration camps and the demise of Medicaid. Before we officially said goodbye to USAID and worried about the closing of regional hospitals.

I actually sat down to write about it. It was a Thursday. When I took a table at Bear Coffee, ordered an iced coffee with cream and sat down at the round white table, opened the laptop. And brought up the page, even. This page. And I started writing. Words came out sparsely, weakly. They were rigid and uncaring like soldiers. No nonsense, too. There wasn’t any magic or courage to them. No juice.

Why didn’t it feel right? I don’t know, but what I had then wasn’t it.

It wasn’t wrong

exactly, it was true. Just not real, if that makes sense. The words were true but not real. Not the language of Sabbatical.

It was all prescription and not living. Like the language of a camp director, not a counsellor, let alone a camper! The language of a CEO who has never invented anything. Artifice and semantic.

And it was also setting alarms on vacation. Making to-do lists for Saturday mornings. Homework for Friday night.

I needed to just not.

Not do this.

But what then is this?

This has to matter

I’m a huge fan of Seth Godin. A devotee. I’ve read books and blogs, bought a page-a-day calendar and joined a workshop. And when he says that creative people, for the sake of their creativity, should choose to write a blog post every day, I listened.

For a long time, I resisted the concept of every day, but for almost two years, I did it. Every single day.

And then a year ago, I went back to school. I’m working on a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing and I didn’t think I could keep up the pace.

This isn’t true, exactly. I could. But there was something else in the way.

perfectionism

which is a concept I’m coming to see is like body dysmorphia of the mind. We can’t see our place in the world as it really is. We look at things and need them to be better. At ourselves. Our behaviors. Work. Our brains say over and over, get better.

But even if we had an accurate view of ourselves, we don’t have a clear sense of better. Like thinner, there’s always work to do.

And if I wrote every day, it would all have to be good and planned and fit into my vision for this blog. There is a brand here, after all.

So after nearly two years of daily writing, I reduced my output. Because the writing had to be better, you know? It has to be meaningful and relevant, at least that’s what they say. Useful to people. Hear these words, friends. Hear how heavy they are. How restrictive and confining and anxiety-producing they are.

Unscripted living

The prescription the professional writer offers the novice is simply to write. Just write. Every day perhaps. And I do. But the war;

the war of perfect

is fixated on the prescription. Not the writing or the beloved, the muse, the dance with inspiration and practice, but the answer, the script. Do this.

So like the novice’s search for the professional’s secrets: what pen they prefer to use or what the routine looks like so they can buy the right tools and copy the routine and become a real writer! And it just doesn’t work that way. Because it isn’t the script to obey, but the prescription to discover the truth for oneself.

And as I approached the Sabbatical, I stopped. Like I stopped the daily blogging a year ago, I stopped the script so that I could find something like time itself. Love itself in the living.

Hide and Seek

My Sabbatical is a combination of home and travel, so we have taken one trip and I will take more soon. Otherwise, I am home and here. Living without a script, however, involves a great amount of fixating on what I want to be doing and what I “ought” to be doing. So as much as I think I’m living without a script, there is a secret one hiding in the back of my mind.

One guess on what it is saying.

So I wake each day choosing to write. Or not. To read. Or not. To play. Or not.

And there is something freeing in accepting the choice. In choosing to play a game during the day. To write when the mood hits. To read something every day.

Freeing, too, to want to write and read and play and do stuff. To choose the level of concern, of caring about the outcome, about the material of the making and of the receiving. Far more than social media. Than content for the voracious appetite of the algorithm and its scraping tools for AI’s thieving.

This is the living I intended to do now, in this season. To live it with imperfect routines and joyful play. Writing when I want to, in the way I want to. Here, yes. On Substack, too. Where I will. Because it is the doing of it, the writing, crafting; messy, yes, if necessary or desired. Perfect? Never. The wrong measurement. Same with better. Only good. What I make it.