I’ve been on this gift-to-myself sabbatical for over four months. Stepping into some consulting now, but honestly it’s a little scary to realize how challenging it is to fit even 10 hours of work per week into what already feels like a very full life. If you just rolled your eyes… please know, so did I. At myself.

To some extent, I hardly know where all the time goes. But I do know one thing I’ve been really enjoying. A small luxury that costs hardly anything… except time.

I love to take the long way. Like my father did.

He had a pathfinder’s sense of direction and knew the backroads for miles and miles around. Whereas I… do not. In my case, I have to set Google Maps on avoid-highways mode. I’m grateful for the tech that makes me like Keanu with his first brain upgrade in that Matrix dojo: “I know Route Two!”

It’s often surprising to me, how little time it actually takes to take my time. If I’ve gotta go somewhere, I run the directions in both modes and compare. Do I have seven extra minutes for this trip? Twelve, for that one? Oooh, this time it would cost 34 more minutes to twist through forests and fields, along lakes and rivers, instead of blasting down the boring highway as fast as legally possible. An hour instead of a half-hour. Can I spend that much time?

Yes. Hell yes. These days, I can. It makes me happy.

But like I said, it also makes me feel scared.

It’s scary because I have to wonder, how will I ever bear to give up this sweeter pace and spend most of my time working again? I’ll need to, I assume, because I will have to make more money at some point. I’d like to retire someday and stuff like that.

It’s also scary to feel this way because it’s SUCH A FREAKING RIDICULOUS PRIVILEGE that I’ve been able to take this time-out. I can’t shake the sense that I’m selfishly helping myself to something incredibly unfair. There’s just no reasonable reason why this should be available to me, when it has never been an option for most humans who have ever walked the earth.

And yet I want it. So much. I want to keep as much of this current life as I can.

So I end up asking myself again and again, as I think about how to design my future: is it okay to want this?

Am I contributing enough to the world, in exchange for all this unfair privilege it has randomly bestowed upon me? I’m volunteering some, and I’m trying to be helpful to others in my writing, and I’m gently pushing my financial advisors to do better on offering socially responsible investing options to all their clients, and now I’m working 25% FTE for a great organization, and… I’m justifying, aren’t I?

Growing up, I never felt pressured to be IMPORTANT. There wasn’t a sense that I had to be a doctor or lawyer or run for President or whatever.

But I do have such a clear memory of the Thanksgiving when I told my grandfather I’d decided to go into the nonprofit sector. Maybe 1995? A couple of years post-college, or thereabouts. I’d tried a standard Ivy-League-to-business-world path, and it made me cry all the time. Until I realized I could spend my time doing fundraising for a wonderful local job-training organization I’d fallen in love with.

Grampa, an engineer and inventor who retired after a half-century at General Electric, looked at me over the turkey with distress written across his loving face. “Nonprofit? But you seemed to be functioning so well!”

I always thought that was hilarious, albeit also a little hurtful. LOL, he saw me as malfunctioning! Something in my wiring had gone faulty, in his engineer’s view of how things ought to work. How silly.

But I wonder now. Is it me asking if it’s okay to want what I want? Or is it Grampa?

Or maybe it’s bigger than that. Maybe Grampa, as a child of immigrants and of the Great Depression, was simply one of the O.G.’s of this grind culture that is as American as apple pie. I mean, the dude came up from working in his family’s shoe store to go to MIT only to graduate into an employment environment so anti-Semitic that he had to change his name to camouflage his identity.

What I’m loving now… it’s not that much to want, really. Not a lavish lifestyle. A one-bedroom apartment. Cooking at home. Walking as my major hobby. Reading the news and my favorite advice columns. Writing, a lot. Sitting around talking with friends and family and boyfriend.

What makes it feel luxurious is the peace. And the pace. Which brings me back to my father, and his joy in beautiful back roads.

With all of this whirling around in my head and heart, I’m trying to stay open to possibilities. Not clinging to what I have now; this one mode of life is not the only way I can be happy, I know that. And yet also, not reflexively shutting down the yearning for more of this feeling.

I’ll probably look for more consulting. Maybe get a duplex, rent out the other half. Stitch together enough income to keep this small and beautiful life going.

Or maybe something else will happen, and I’ll find a path to feeling peace in a whole different way. Something I haven’t yet imagined.

I guess I’m taking the long way.

Onwards. ❤️