A Reflection After Sabbatical

12 weeks · 18 novels · 17 movies · 12 hikes · 10 handwritten letters · 6 house projects

As an organizer, I’ve been trained to count. Numbers are how we show our work, so it was easy to end my sabbatical with an accounting: What did I do? The obvious problem is that the whole point of sabbatical is to step outside the usual pace of work. And those numbers tell almost none of the story of the impact this break had on me.

If you had asked me before my sabbatical how badly I needed it, I would have said I was doing pretty well and could wait if necessary…... In truth, I pushed myself to take it because I had written sabbatical leave into our policy handbook—and I know that if leadership doesn’t take the rest we’ve built into our policies, no one else will believe it’s really available to them. I wanted to model that the rest we offer is real. I didn’t realize until the sabbatical began how much I needed it, too.

Rest is hard for organizers. I was struck by how many people asked whether my team was reaching out to me or whether I’d had to “put out fires.” (They didn’t, and I didn’t—my team is a powerhouse and I set clear boundaries.) What I didn’t know how to answer was: What does it feel like to simply stop?

For the first three weeks, I tried to turn sabbatical into a different kind of productivity—doctors’ appointments, painting my bathroom, Goodwill runs, lightbulb changes, and weeding. I was still buzzing with energy. It wasn’t until I spent three weeks at a Windcall residency, with encouragement to “be” and not “do”,  that I began to understand how difficult rest was for me. The quiet made me itchy. I wanted to plan, accomplish, fill the space.

I started The OC in June 2020, about three months after leaving my Organizing Director job and just as the world was shutting down. I was figuring out home-school life with two kids while national uprisings swept the country and I sewed facemasks for my family. Building and running an organization is a monstrous task even under ordinary circumstances. Add COVID, Trumpism, genocide in Palestine, climate catastrophe, and the relentless work of the last six years, and the toll was greater than I understood.

Thankfully, I’ve been working with a somatics coach for years, and he helped me stay with that discomfort instead of immediately doing something about it. I had time to listen to my body, get curious about feelings I usually ignore, and practice being still.

Over the course of 12 weeks, I got to know myself better—not as an organizer, co-director, or parent, but simply as myself. And that, more than the books or hikes or completed projects, is what my sabbatical made possible.

Now, I’m coming back with a deeper belief that rest isn’t a reward for finishing the work. Rest is part of the work. It is part of how we build organizations and movements that can last.

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