It may come to as a surprise to some of you that tomorrow I will return to EA as a regular full-time employee (with benefits and bonuses). This was something I had arranged a long time ago. I don’t want to say exactly how long ago but I will say that well before I started any of my travels I already knew when I had to go back to work.
I last worked on February 19, 2016. If Wolfram|Alpha is correct, that’s three months and eighteen days since I had to wake up early and clock in for the man. It’s been a lot of fun and I absolutely have appreciated every single day that I didn’t have to work and had the freedom to do whatever I wanted.
Since 2010, I’ve had several of these wonderful extended periods of freedom. I’ve learned that these are extremely valuable parcels of time. At first, I used to use the time to just stay up late, play video games, and eat terrible food. I realized though, it’s better to use some of the time for more productive things.
For this particular sabbatical, my focus was travel. I feel very lucky to have journeyed to Hawaii, San Diego, and most recently London. Each trip was fun in its unique way and it was very rewarding to just go out on adventures. I remember getting back from Hawaii, spending one short week back at home, and then having to jet down to San Diego. I normally don’t travel like that and it felt awesome going from one vacation spot to another so quickly.
I also was thankful to have the time to take that improv class in March. I guess it seems so long ago now but spending those Monday evenings in March re-learning and practicing improv concepts was so fun. As I mentioned before, I would have taken the second class but my travel plans in April and May prevented that from happening. It looks like July will be a good time to take the next class as my travel plans are at a rest for now.
As much fun and rewarding the travel and improv classes were, in general, I cherished every single day where I didn’t have to get up early and go to work. The fact that I could stay up as late I wanted to, doing whatever pleased me, and then waking up whenever my body felt like it was a true gift. Sometimes when I describe to people a typical day like that, I feel they kinda gloss over it and perceive it as a boring day. It’s actually not. We’re constantly forced to shoehorn our time into daily schedules that are frequently set external factors. We’re forced to wake up at a certain time to get to work at a certain time. We’re forced to get to home at a certain time to pick up the kids and get dinner made. We’re forced to get to bed at a certain time because if we don’t we’ll be a zombie tomorrow morning. For the most part, none of that really applied to me for over three months. I controlled my own life and it was very good for my soul.
Alas, I’ll have to tuck away my freedom again for the foreseeable future, hopefully for not too long. Weekends will mean something to me again. I will again not enjoy Mondays.
To think I was just in London. Oh well, I need to get to bed and set my alarm clock.