My 5 Month Sabbatical - A Special Thanksgiving

With Thanksgiving right around the corner, I would like to take time to give thanks to all that has been important, influential or significant in my life this past year. And in addition to the usual suspects (i.e. friends, family, good health) I would also like to give thanks to my company, which has allowed me to take a 5 month sabbatical from work, and which will officially end this next Tuesday. I had high hopes and plans for this time off: discover who I was, figure out what I wanted to do/be, reconnect with friends and family and hopefully be ready to go back to work. In retrospect, during the five months, I did some serious travelling, caught up on my personal life and did some not so successful soul searching….here is the breakdown.

Four weeks into the extended vacation, I could no longer distinguish between a weekday and weekend. And around week 7, I had enjoyed some serious bonding time with my mom, brother and dad…on one Tuesday, I managed to spend 4 hours watching Bridezilla with my dad, who at one point asked for the remote, not to turn the channel (which was my fear), but rather to record the next episode.

By month three, my sabbatical with work officially ended (meaning my three months of partial pay and full benefits) and my Leave of Absence began. And with the beginning of the LOA and only two months off left, I developed a strong aversion to all responsibility and commitments. However, like karma, responsibility came back with vengeance. Exactly three months and one week in and my finances were a wreck… insurance claims (both health and car), canceled credit cards and frozen Swiss bank accounts.

By the end of month four, the onset of work seemed inevitable so I began to assess my time off so far. And while I hadn’t (and probably wouldn’t) accomplish most items on my list of goals, - learn guitar, take singing lessons, perfect my German and write the great American novel - I couldn’t deny the fact that I was having a great time…this moment was of course followed by the fleeting regret that I had just wasted four plus months doing absolutely nothing - I hadn’t figured out what I wanted to do with my life, hadn’t even really looked back at my time in Europe and my brain power overall was seriously depleted (I could no longer remembers dates, key facts and was more ditzy and forgetful than my pregnant girlfriends.) It was around this time that, although consciously dreading the return to work, I was also beginning to look forward to getting back into some sort of routine and rejoining the community of working people.

I guess in the end, the sabbatical served some purpose…I got to see a lot of great friends all over the world and at the end I was, and am, ready to go back to work. The question really is, how long will I want to stay back at work.