My Writer’s Sabbatical at Three Years

I’ve done what I said I was going to do.

I left teaching in June of 2021 in order to write novels. 

It’s June of 2024, and I’ve written four.

In 2021, my wife and I, being empty-nesters, decided to seize this moment in our lives and take a break, insert a pause, and pull a Ferris Bueller:

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and take a look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

We’d lived in North Carolina for seventeen years. We’d raised our kids and put them through college. They were living on their own and pursuing their passions and beginning their independent lives.

So we ran away.

We’d planned it for several years. We saved money, gave away our material things, downsized, moved back to Michigan, lived cheaply and lightly, and focused on ourselves.

Okay, fine, we moved back in with my wife’s parents, but we’re Gen-Xers. Old habits die hard.

My in-laws have a suburban house with a walk-out basement that looks out onto woods surrounding a pond frequented by egrets, herons, kingfishers, woodpeckers, geese, ducks, hawks, owls, deer, muskrats, turtles, frogs, chipmunks, and an occasional fox.

It’s a great place to hide from the world and get some writing done.

In the last three years, we’ve had the chance to catch up with relatives and friends in Michigan, where we grew up, and we’ve had the chance to catch up on sleep. A good sleep is not a little nothing. It’s a big something, as the experts tell us nowadays. We appreciate, for the first time in our lives, our nightly eight hours of sleep. 

So we’ve had the chance to leave behind the frenzied, multiple endeavors of our sleepless forties and heal, restore ourselves, and become human again. We’re in our fifties, and in the past three years, we’ve had the chance to cook and read, take up new arts and crafts, exercise, keep journals, plan for the future, and enjoy life in the moment.

Like Ferris Bueller, I recommend taking real time for yourself, like years if you can. Jobs can warp your sense of self and your sense of time. You can sacrifice parts of yourself to live up to the job’s daily emergencies. You can easily lose your sense of proportion and sprint when you should jog. The importance of the job looms large when you’re in the thick of it, but, let me tell you, these emergencies shrink back to size when you shrug off the superhero’s cape of your employment. 

Life moves fast, with you or without you.

Yes, this sabbatical comes at a cost to our lifestyle (downsizing, living smaller, penny-pinching, depending on the generosity of family and the sofas of friends), but this has been an invaluable time for us. We don’t regret it. We wouldn’t trade it. 

We lived a suburban life while we raised our kids. We mowed that lawn, paid that tuition, and checked that box. And now we’ve been able to adapt because we took the time to sit down and look at our lives and consider our options for the future and choose, consciously, to focus on our priorities. It’s worth the price we pay.

Since I began the sabbatical, I’ve written new novels, edited my past novel manuscripts, and continued a daily journal I started in 2019, which is now over 300,000 words. I’ve been writing these blog entries, some of which I will collect in a book on writing, and they’re at about 70,000 words. I’ve read over 300 books since I began this sabbatical and created over 1,000 pages of art.

I may have left a job, but I’ve never stopped working. I’m using my time the way I want to: reading, writing, making art.

Life moves pretty fast, and we’re not done looking around. 

I’m already writing the next novel.

_____

PHOTO: When we visited our daughter in North Carolina (and I gave a commencement speech at Woodlawn School), we stayed with good friends who live on Lake Norman.