When I imagined my sabbatical, I saw myself in Italy learning to make pasta (à la Aziz Ansari in S2 of Master of None, shout out to anyone who’s seen this). Maybe all-in on writing about my startup experience and posting it on Substack. Maybe launching new apps, or hitting all the cool bucket-list festivals around the world.
The reality looks a lot different.
When I’m in my day, it feels quite full and passes quickly. An hour of meditation. A workout. Some reading. Checking what’s happening with AI. Looking at stocks. But at the end of the week, the voice kicks in. What am I building towards? I’m not shipping a big product. I’m not on some grand journey somewhere. What is all of this?
At the end of most weeks, I can’t help but feel a little guilty. What did I do this week? Is it enough? Am I using the “most” out of my sabbatical?
When I observe these feelings, I realize I’ve always had them since I was a kid. To not waste. To make the most out of everything. My scarcity instinct. Growing up as an immigrant kid, we had to make the most of everything. We would eat every part of a salmon, even the head. In fact, there were times when we would just buy the head because it was way cheaper.
This week’s theme is Emet, truth. And the version hitting me right now is about being truthful with myself. Our minds are full of biases that actively deceive us across how we see the past, present, and future. My scarcity instinct was true when we were buying salmon heads. It’s less true now. But it’s still running.
My friends say the sabbatical is cool but they’re also asking me, do I know what I’m doing next? When will I want to go back? And the voice inside my head echoes them: what am I actually building towards? In actuality, I’m enjoying the experience of going with the flow. I’m planning certain things but oftentimes not. These are all truths but none of it is the full picture. It’s like the elephant parable where everyone has their own perception of a partial truth.
The thing that’s helping me sit in this tension is, ironically, my meditation practice. Just sitting there, doing nothing, saying nothing, scanning my body. Learning to observe what is versus what my mind adds on top of it. The sabbatical guilt is just another sensation arising, a story attaching itself, and my mind treating the story as truth.
I’m getting better at noticing the pattern instead of being swallowed by it. The practice designed around doing nothing is teaching me to be okay with a sabbatical that looks like “not doing enough.”
How funny is that?