mrinal

Being on sabbatical has messed with my sense of time and productivity. The sense of urgency at work seemed to compress the entire day more than I was appreciating. Wake up quickly, commute efficiently, squeeze email replies into the coffee line or elevator. Wolf down dinner, fit a hard workout into 45 minutes, skim interesting articles you stumble across, keep tabs on a dozen different Slack threads, then still find time to rush through a chapter of personal reading before knocking out. I assumed that removing the work block would add 8-12 productive hours back to each day, but it never seemed to work like that for me. On sabbatical, you're a bit slower to get up in the morning. You sit with your coffee for a while. You actually read that random article in your inbox all the way through. You linger over a nice breakfast, then find yourself out in the sun not really doing anything for five minutes or half an hour. You read 30-50 pages of your current book and actually sit with it, maybe chasing down a few tangents or references along the way. A bit of life admin, a slow trip to the grocery store, a dinner built around some new recipe, then some time winding down for bed. Before you know it, the day is just sort of over, and all you did was read 40 pages, send some emails, and eat two nice meals. You maybe didn't even get around to meditating despite having basically no formal claims on your time. I had an instinctive revulsion to this at first, like I’d made a sort of negative-sum exchange. I spent a while cargo-culting the tempo of work into an empty calendar, trying to recreate that same sense of urgency and forward motion. But without an actual forcing function, it never really took. I knew the deadlines were fake, and the day kept expanding around them anyway. I eventually stopped fighting it and accepted that removing work from the equation had just sort of inflated everything else in my life: slower meals, slower reading, slower conversations, more time wandering or doing nothing in particular. I’m still often confused at the end of the day, unsure of where the time went, but I’ve mostly stopped treating that as a problem to solve and instead view it as the inherent tempo of the season I’m in. There's something illegible about what I'm getting out of this season. I can feel myself paying finer-grained attention throughout the day, even if there's no clean metric at the end of it to tally against. Maybe six months of lingering slightly too long in the tomato aisle at Berkeley Bowl is slowly beating the Protestant work ethic out of me.