Sabbatical at 26

Originally published on Medium ; July 21, 2019

At 26, I’m taking a “sabbatical.”

I put sabbatical in quotes to acknowledge that it’s an untraditional one, given that I’m neither a tenured professor nor accomplished professional…and this sabbatical is both self-initiated and self-funded…

That being said, my sabbatical definitely did not come to fruition by myself. It’s because of my support system that I am lucky enough to take risks.

Thus, it is with immense gratitude that I write this post from Europe, two months into a year-long sabbatical dedicated to chasing curiosities, working on various projects, and inevitably failing miserably along the way.

Scratching old and new itches

This sabbatical was largely sparked by the need to scratch a 20 year old itch — the urge to make stuff.

I’ve been making art at varying degrees of intensity since I was a kid. And while I’ve been making space for it outside of my 9–5 jobs, I told myself at a young age that I would give it a full-time go at some point in my life.

Beyond creating art, I’m using this sabbatical to create space to explore the things I’m curious about — both professional and otherwise. Can I teach myself these things with open-source courses, books pulled from syllabi, podcasts, coffees with people I admire? What might need to be supplemented with more schooling?

All that being said, I’m already realizing that the value of this year will come less from what I do and more from how I do it: How can I develop a creative process that allows me to take ideas from concept to execution? How can I incorporate deliberate practice of the skills I’m uncomfortable with? How can I choose projects for the sake of the process and not necessarily the product?

Staying open to distractions

I’m trying to work on relinquishing control a bit and restraining from project managing every aspect of this sabbatical. As I described in a Moth talk I recently gave, I have a real tendency to be overly-prescriptive and to fill up my time.

So, while I have a sense for the projects I want to work on, I’m trying to keep this in mind: If I can allow myself to remain open to distractions, my work will likely be better for it.

This theory became a thesis when supported by the advice of mentors I reached out to while discerning whether to take this sabbatical. In fact, the most common perspective on my prospective sabbatical was that its greatest gift would be the number of distractions and thus increased opportunities for serendipity.

A new friend expanded on this idea using the analogy of a sailboat. Many of us have a sense of where we want to end up and so we exert a lot of energy to keep our sailboats headed in the “right” direction and “on track.” But if we’re willing to allow the sailboat to drift wherever the wind blows, we’ll likely be blown even further than our original destination.

His sailboat analogy taught me this: There are often indirect paths to the things we want. And beyond that, the things we want may actually fall short of what we’re capable of.

As a stubborn, process-driven, goal-oriented person, this is taking a while to accept and adopt but I’m trying…

Creating a home in many houses

Over the coming year, I’ll be relocating several times — Finland for now, then Prague, Berlin, Cambodia, Vietnam, Argentina, Colombia, TBD — to challenge myself to continually reset, stay uncomfortable, and quickly adapt.

But for me, the challenge to respond to the external environment is usurped by the challenge to manage my internal realities. I (like all human beings) spend most of my days in my head, amongst my own thoughts [apparently ~50k of them per day].

As one of the many that call depression a life companion, I’m continually working on making my mind a better place to inhabit, so that I can “live” in my head wherever I live.

In that regard, it’s not happiness I seek by traveling, but peace — the ability to sit alone with my thoughts wherever I’m sitting — or more recently, walking.

Last month I kicked off my sabbatical by walking the Camino — 500 miles from Saint Jean Pied de Port in France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. [More on this another time.]

Now I write this from Finland, with gnarly blisters and wide-open days that are currently more disorienting than they are freeing.

But I guess that’s why I left in the first place.

If you’re interested in following along this year — or even better, offering some honest critique/feedback/advice (please!) — I’ll be [intermittently] posting updates on my website, new Instagram, and this new Medium account and can be reached via email (caroline.suttlehan @ gmail.com).