Social Sabbatical 2009

My free-spirited friend Jesse Seaver takes annual(ish) technical vacations. He unplugs for a week or so and refuses to communicate via email, cell phone or internet. He doesn’t watch tv, and he basically just chills.

I totally get that need to unplug.

However, that’s not what I’m personally going through at the moment. Here’s what I’m going through: I kind of just feel like working!

Weird, right?

I just moved into my own solo house, and became a single entity, a self-responsible unit. And that holds a lot of promise. It empowers me to be independent, to do what I want with my time, and to take advantage of the opportunity to be selfish and free. It’s also terrifying. I don’t have a partner to fall back on anymore.

So, I’ve been really focused on just putting one foot in front of the other, and my amazing support system of friends has been so wonderful and has really held me up.

And I am happy to report that I am at a point where I’m not needing the support quite so much anymore. In fact, what I kind of need right now—no, what I really need right now—is to spend some time with myself.

And, for me, that means unplugging from my support system, so I can find… me. So I can go for walks by myself, catch up on my reading, my cooking projects, my dreamboarding, my nesting, and… my work.

When you find a job that makes you excited to work, that’s a beautiful thing. And that’s what I’m feeling right now. (God knows it took me years.) So for the next week, I’ll be offline, in terms of hanging out. I’m going to work on Outside Eye.

It’ll be like a vipassana retreat… but the opposite. I’ll be thinking, deeply. I’ll be typing, all the time. I’ll be creating, collaborating, combusting and California-ing (Mill Valley style).

I just won’t be answering the phone.

See you in a week!

(One last thing… I just realized that I wrote a blog post at this exact same time last year that I originally called Social Sabbatical.  And to that, I’d like to say: one of the most beautiful things about having a short memory is that life is infinitely more interesting!)