140. SABBATICAL - On The Importance of Taking a Break
As we approach the Christmas break, this week’s Philosophy Unleashed is going to make the case for taking a break.
In January, when we return, as we have every term since our first Christmas break in 2019, I will be starting a new teaching job. One I am incredibly excited about despite the fact that, this time last year, I was getting myself ready to quit from not only my old school, but possibly the profession itself.
So why the turnaround?
Simple. It’s because I took a break.
When I left my old job in July, I had all kinds of plans for the future and, at the same time, had no plans at all. A blank slate or tabula rasa on which I could do anything I wanted, including change my mind. But to change my mind, I needed to know my mind. And frankly, after eleven years doing the same thing at the same place, I needed some time away to really do that. To see what I missed, if anything, and to reflect on what I wanted out of life.
A break, quite simply, gave me time off the treadmill in which to think.
It is the same reason you won’t see a new post on Philosophy Unleashed until January 9th. The same reason I have always paused Philosophy Unleashed during the school holiday weeks. Because I know the value of taking time away. To churn out post after post on here without a break would quickly turn this labour of love into a chore. Especially as the intention with PU was never to write all these myself. It was always meant to be a collaborative project with student writers. By stepping away from it for a few weeks every now and again, I am afforded some time to think up new ideas for posts and have some time to actually miss it again.
Let’s be honest - as a project for students to generate their own philosophy, this website has undoubtedly failed. The dogged determinism I show each week that maybe it might remain a useful endeavour regardless can only be done with the bolstering and revivification of time away. Absence makes the heart grow fonder is the old adage. But the adage is only half true. Sometimes the absence just reminds you that you can live without something. If ever I reach the end of a school holiday and no longer feel the urge to write these things, Philosophy Unleashed might well go away!
For many of us this was experienced during the lockdowns at the start of the pandemic. Everything changed, and with that long, long pause from the norm we had time to reassess our lives. Yes, there were things we could no longer do that we used to, but which absences made our hearts grow fonder and which ones passed us by without notice?
For me, it was improvised comedy. I have done improv on and off for most of my adult life and in the months before the pandemic had found a new home with a local improv team after my previous troupe I was part of decided to call it a day the previous summer. We had gigs every week, were really enjoying doing them too, but when the pubs closed, obviously, so too did the gig. Very quickly though, as the weeks passed by without doing the shows anymore, I realised that of all the things I had lost with the covid lockdown, improv wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t missing it. It barely crossed my mind.
Several of us felt the same way, it turned out. We all noticed, in its absence, that we were actually quite happy not to be doing it anymore. The group imploded politely with a couple of WhatsApp messages and we went our separate ways, happier despite it being the end of an era, and so far I still haven’t looked back.
It’s not always that way. When my band broke up in 2006 it was by my own hand. I didn’t feel I had time for it anymore, like Matt Lucas leaving the Bake Off Tent. My Fantasy Football was my PhD. But I have regretted it really ever since and never quite managed to find other musicians as good as the ones I used to work with to make a new band a go. These days though, despite not having a band to play in, I still make music, playing all the instruments myself and recording it at home. Making music is just too enjoyable to be able to stop doing for long.
The cost of living crisis has also forced many of us to take a break from things we previously did. For some, the absence has been devastating. Food and heating absences which have led to great suffering and confirmation of their necessity and the clear failure of government. But for those of us who are a little luckier, the corners we have cut have been in luxury items we used to indulge in. In my own case, cost of living rose right at the time I had chosen unemployment. Our budget had to transform radically. But now that I will be working again not all of those cuts will be restored. It turned out we didn’t need all those streaming services we used to have, or the membership to the cinema. That getting takeaway less frequently has encouraged more creative cooking at home. That magazine subscriptions for periodicals that frequently ended up in the bin, unread, are as bad for the environment as they were for our bank account. That I didn’t need another overpriced band t-shirt even if I thought I did. Things which seemed impossible to go without, once gone, can be revealed to be utterly inessential. Meanwhile taking a break from other things has gone the other way. As soon as I’m earning again, it’ll be back to getting some new tattoos. We’re looking to blow some money on travel again as soon as we can, and we’ve missed recklessly spending on gigs and theatre tickets like we used to. What we had previously become a little bit jaded to, now, gone from our lives, has regained its previous lustre.
A similar thing happens frequently with food. A meal you love one night and then cook again too often suddenly becomes dull and unappealing. You roll your eyes at the thought of eating it and it soon disappears from the menu, but a few months later you revive it again and it tastes like the very first time. Chocolate too. Over Christmas I will always overindulge and end up with stuff in my mouth I don’t even realise I am eating. I will grow bored of chocolate. By January I shall have sworn off the stuff in a bid to lose the Christmas pounds…but after some time away a single square of Dairy Milk will taste once again like the very best thing in the world.
Christmas is an interesting time for taking a break, because Christmas, for me, is a time full of traditions. Things I can’t imagine the season without. But then I can look back over my life and see that there were other traditions in the past that have fallen by the wayside and Christmas has remained just as special despite their absence. An item no longer in stock, a person no longer with us, a venue closed down or an attitude changed, a decoration broken with time and no longer functioning the way it once did. What once seemed integral to celebrating is denied through circumstance one year and then you realise it was never actually needed at all. Or you discover that it was, and double the effort is made the following year to bring it back. The pause allows reflection. Time away teaches us a lesson about what counts.
It makes sense, philosophically. After all, we philosophers know only too well how unreliable our perceptions can be. The blue chair in front of me may not be blue at all, and if I turn my head I can still see it, even in my eye’s blind spot, where I know it is no longer the actual chair I can see, but the imaginary chair my brain has created to fill in the empty space. Sometimes my perception is so eager to fill in the blanks and make sense of things that it can break completely with reality. Stories of mental breakdowns or people in moments of great trauma are stories of people whose brains are busy crafting false but believable stories as a way of coming to terms with something too difficult to face head on. We know our perceptions are untrustworthy. We can read whole passages of gibberish text because our brain just pretends it makes sense. Dkn’t belepve me? Wpll rexd thpse lbst two sentercis bgck.
I’ll wait.
It shouldn’t be surprising to realise that, for an animal which literally shuts completely down every night and knocks itself unconscious as a means of essential restoration, stopping is good for human beings. The modern trend for mindfulness, and mindfulness’ ancient origins, show the impact simply pausing and retraining our attention on something else can have for our wellbeing. To focus on the breath instead of the thoughts racing through our heads, or to take in all the sounds around us that we haven’t even realised were there to hear. The essence of being mindful - of focusing on the present instead of thinking back on the past or worrying too much about the future - is to disrupt the standard way we relate to the world and consider it in a different way. As it is instead of how it was or might be.
Disruption is a key tool in any radical thinker’s belt. To, in the racist, Kant’s, words, speaking of the impact of that other racist, David Hume, on his work, wake us from ‘dogmatic slumbers’. You do things a certain way for too long and you can fool yourself into believing your choices are unchangeable facts about the world. The radical offers a new way of seeing or doing things which makes us realise that norms are not how things must be, only how they might be, and that they can be something different too if we want them to be. Disruption is a different way of pausing. It takes a break from the unthinking practices of embedded behaviours and reminds us of our existential freedom.
All of which is to say that I have very much enjoyed my sabbatical from teaching, but as soon as I found myself away from the classroom I was champing at the bit to get back in front of students again. As radical educator, bell hooks, says ‘all teachers - in every teaching situation from kindergarten to university settings - need time away from teaching at some point in their career. The amount of time is relative.’ It turned out I only needed a term this time. I was delighted to see how many people booked me as a guest speaker or visiting teacher to their schools during this time and, through that disruption of my break and its necessary consequence of giving me the ability to disrupt my old ways of doing things the way I did them at my previous school and try something new, I was able to fall in love with teaching again. As hooks also says ‘dislocation is the perfect context for free-flowing thought that lets us move beyond the restricted confines of a familiar social order.’
One doesn’t always have to change the world to change the world. Sometimes you just need to change how you interact with the world that already is. Some more wisdom from hooks: ‘there are no closed systems…every system has a gap and…in that space is a place of possibility.’ And if you can’t find those spaces, then all you have to do is step away and make them.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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