For those just tuning in, I am on a year-long sabbatical from…a lot. If 2020 was good for anything, it was making folks the globe over start considering what the heck they were doing with their One Life, and I’m no exception. Don’t get me wrong, 2020 was good to me. I used the isolation time to publish three (THREE!) books, officially fulfilling my life’s goal of becoming a published author. I, uh, made it and it only took a world-wide pandemic to finally get my butt together enough to make a dream come true.
As anyone reading this will surely know, with the advent of the Covid vaccines, life is beginning to carry on. The good people of Earth are beginning to return to their own definitions of normal, but some folks are still in that “What the heck am I doing?” phase. That’s me. I’m some folks.
Getting the taste of how life could be during the lock-downs of 2020 was just an appetizer. When I was able to step away, I began to understand just how much other people, as well as society in general, hijacked my life. I began a very deep time of questioning what I had gone so long believing to be true about myself and realized I couldn’t do it while still so immersed in the system that poisoned me to begin with. You can’t heal in the environment that made you sick, after all.
Early March 2021, I declared the following 12 months to be a year-long sabbatical, during which I committed myself to opening my mind and exploring my beliefs. I stepped away from texting, social media, emailing, videos, social gatherings, and committed myself to using letter-writing as my only real source of socialization. My phone was still open for phone calls but we all know no one does that anymore, so it has been very quiet since March.
With the entirety of the spring months now under wraps, my sabbatical is moving on to summertime, which is bringing a whole host of freedom I haven’t had the last three months. Both of my children are officially grown “adults” who are responsible for themselves, which leaves Kyle and I in a place we have never been before: completely independent. Not just from our children, but also from each other.
For the first time in my life, I have no one to answer to but myself, for anything. It’s wild, to say the least. Standing at Day 1 of the rest of my life is something I never really expected to have happen, and the doors that are open to me are vast and exhilarating. So much possibility!
Still, I have another nine months of sabbatical to go through, so the very first adventure I’m on is an exploration into myself, taking deep looks into the shadows, shaking out what I find and seeing what is worth holding on to for the rest of my time with a pulse. It’s unlike any journey I’ve ever taken before and I can’t wait to get started.
