In Praise of the Sabbatical | What if we took a break?

What if we could all, in the middle of our lives, somewhere after the children but before retirement, take a few months to ourselves, just for ourselves? Some of us already do it, for lots of reasons, practical or philosophical. In particular: because life goes by too quickly…

Take some “time”, “step back”, rest, get your “mental juices” and also your physical juices back. Change your pace, you know. To do what? Find yourself. And essentially take stock of your life and what you want to do with what’s left of it. In this crazy back-to-school season at breakneck speed, admit that it’s a dream. This is precisely what comes up constantly, when interviewing people who have taken this kind of long-term leave, sabbaticals and other deferred leave. Sometimes at their own expense.

Speaking of costs, and before going any further, a clarification. We will not enter here into a detailed analysis of the financial strategies to make such a leave a reality. It is the more existential considerations that interest us here.

“The world of work moves much too fast! People forget that there are other things. For me, a break is always beneficial,” confides Marie Grenier, a civil servant in Ottawa, who recently took a year to be a clown! At 55, and after a career in international cooperation, she knows that this year studying the discipline and doing community theatre has given her a moment of “stepping back” that is strangely enlightening. “Do I want to continue [dans mon domaine] or do something else? Because if I want to do something else, it’s happening now!”

“We never have time to ask ourselves these questions!” confirms Karine Glorieux, a CEGEP professor and author, whom we met at the start of the school year, her very first (exhausted) week after an eight-month sabbatical. “It’s when you get back into the swing of things that you realize how accustomed you had become to a certain slowness…”, she says.

In the last few months, in addition to traveling (and celebrating her 50th birthday, without a partner or children, but with girlfriends, somewhere in Thailand), she has mostly written a book and worked on screenwriting projects. “Before you run out of energy, it’s nice to take a break, get out of your own life, imagine another possible life,” she says.

“Yes, this kind of thinking takes time,” adds the mother of three, who has been teaching literature for over 20 years. She took advantage of the opportunity here to take a breather, to stop running, without being constantly torn between different obligations. “It’s not true that a spa on Saturday afternoon is enough for mental health. It takes more than that… »

“It’s when you stop that you realize the accumulated fatigue,” adds Richard Fahey, 56, a lawyer by training, forced to take two leaves (with pay) due to reorganizations in different organizations where he worked. “It gave me the luxury of asking myself questions, of resting, of seeing where I wanted to go.”

Trend? Midlife crisis? Dennis (DJ) DiDonna, founder of the Sabbatical Project in San Francisco, an organization dedicated to popularizing sabbaticals, sees it as a side effect of the pandemic. “We know there’s also more and more burnout, but since the pandemic, people have realized that life is short and precious,” he says. “It’s like work is no longer the most important thing.”

The 42-year-old entrepreneur himself came close to exhaustion before dropping everything to go on a pilgrimage to Japan and New Zealand for a few months a few years ago. Upon his return, he decided to document the benefits of sabbaticals, a form of leave that has been strangely little studied until now. After about fifty interviews, he co-wrote an article published in the Harvard Business Review (“The Transformative Power of Sabbaticals”) last year, and is working on a book (Time Off Well Spent) to be published soon. Since then, he has collected some 300 testimonies.

Read the article “The Transformative Power of Sabbaticals”

“Everyone who has done it says it is one of the most important things ever done in life. […] There is something profound happening.” Namely: renewed energy and more creativity.

Talk to Lydia Yakonowsky, an economist for 20 years who recently took a year of “midlife retirement” to pursue her passion: art. A VJ on Montreal’s electronic music scene in her rare free time, the economist on sabbatical spent the year creating: “I gave myself absolute creative freedom.”

She also gave herself time to take a big step back and grieve for various life projects (it happens too…). This leave, taken at her own expense, is “the worst financial decision,” she laughs, “but the best for [elle] “. In what way? “Comfort in personal life is a drag,” she philosophizes. “If you are uncomfortable, that’s where you can rebuild yourself as you want, as you are.”

We can guess that she has thought a lot during the last few months.

The only negative point about the sabbatical, which came up several times in this report: its end! Back to work, “it’s as if the leave didn’t exist!” laments Natascha Niederstrass, a visual arts teacher at the CEGEP, who has just taken six months to “take the time to take the time” and devote herself to her art. As soon as classes start again, “we get sucked in”…

Don’t tell that to Dominic Vézina, who is leaving at the end of the month with a one-way ticket to Hanoi. The 49-year-old social entrepreneur has had enough, crazy hours. He decided to drop everything, see if he could afford it, by subletting his apartment and emptying his savings. “It’s a general questioning,” summarizes the man, seated on a sunny Friday in front of a beer, a few days before his departure. Single, the children gone to an apartment, and on the eve of his 50th birthday, he made a realization: “I need to slow down,” he says, “I want to recharge my batteries to better plan for the future.” […] What am I really, what do I want to leave behind? […] If we were truly a progressive society, instead of sick leave, we would have time off to question ourselves. Why wait until we break down before thinking?

In the past year, he has lost four friends his own age. “People are leaving. I’m next in line,” he says. “So can I have some fun?”