This is the first piece in a series on my sabbatical and career transition.
So it begins. Today, January 1, 2024, I begin my first sabbatical, and I’m hoping I can turn into a career/life pivot.
Over the next year, I want to set myself up to become a more meaningful contributor to my community, do work that aligns with my personal mission and core principles, and develop my personal spirituality.
It’s been a long and slow build-up to this day. One moment I remember I was reading Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life about fungi, in which he describes the symbiotic relationship between trees, fungi, and living organisms in an ecosystem. When a tree is short on water or nutrients because it’s winter, another organism can provide to support the tree through the shortage. In turn, the tree may - or may not - later support the other organism when it’s struggling. My read (which is more spiritual and as someone who isn’t a biologist may be misunderstanding the situation) is that surviving is hard and that it takes a complex network of symbiotic relationships to survive together; life is trying to make life survive, not an individual entity trying to make an individual entity thrive.
Merlin Sheldrake summarizes this as the organisms are practicing mutual aid. And for reasons I don’t fully understand, this hit me hard. I had totally misunderstood mutual aid and my role in it, and I needed to re-think what I was doing.
A big part of the next year is figuring this out. What does it mean to practice mutual aid? How does the network fit together? Am I contributing meaningfully? Is there a way to tell if I am?
I’m getting started this morning by thinking and collating. I have a ton of thoughts, ideas, and tasks for moving forward, so I’m trying to get them down on paper so I can proceed.