I think I might very well take a jubilee year very soon. I’m so close to giving up on this illusion called a career. Lately it seems like every other book I read has a thesis about finding one’s true bliss by using your time authentically. The latest one is a memoir about a woman who sold all her possessions and took off traveling for a year.
I do wonder if–after the first month– I’d spend a lot of time panicking and thinking ‘what’s next?’ but I guess the point of a jubilee year is you don’t let that part concern you. You only have to think about it after the year is done.
Anyways I don’t think I’d travel the whole time for a year, mostly because I have a family who needs to stay in one place. But I would take lots of trips. To New Zealand, to Brazil, to Japan, and South Africa. I’d spend the summer in Vermont, basking by the lake, doing gardening, learning crafts and making art. I used to love art, and think I could love it again.
My book club last night was with 3 retired women and they all spent time showing me their crafts: knitting and beading and decorating. They talked about the flow of it, which I never get with my own work. I got so excited by this idea of having flow, which once again I read about when I was nineteen and aspired to have but never quite got it.
So for sure I’d focus on learning how to find flow, to savor an activity not because I think it will get me somewhere but just for the sake of doing it.
I was having a conversation with a friend last weekend about how much expectation I’ve had of myself over my lifetime, and it was always with the best intentions: appreciating very early on this was the one life I got and so I had to make it count, see how far I could go. But now of course I wonder if I spent too much time thinking that going far was about having other people perceive that, in a way that other people’s perceptions were the only true yardstick of achieving. It’s quite another thing to wonder what you, if you were the last person on earth, would feel is worth achieving, if there was no one around to perceive it.
So in a way this ‘only one left’ attitude cuts out needing to create or art, since a lot of art is about expressing yourself to others. But there’s still a lot of room for understanding things, paying attention to things you haven’t paid attention to before.
Then again, this jubilee year won’t be by myself. I do think that’s what I’m after. I know I crave company, the opinions of others. I was waiting in the car with my son yesterday for an orthodontist appointment and I remarked to him how much I love looking at people and imagining their lives. A rather gaudily dressed middle aged black woman was walking by looking very tired, but her holding her head high. Meanwhile a young twenty-something guy, skinny, dodgy-looking, dressed in black, walked in the other direction. I had no idea what they were thinking, if I’d want to really know what they were thinking, but the whole universe of their lives suddenly became very interesting because it was clearly so different from my own.
Maybe a jubilee year really will be about understanding and truly empathizing with others, rather than just watching them.
— siobhan
I do wonder if–after the first month– I’d spend a lot of time panicking and thinking ‘what’s next?’ but I guess the point of a jubilee year is you don’t let that part concern you. You only have to think about it after the year is done.
Anyways I don’t think I’d travel the whole time for a year, mostly because I have a family who needs to stay in one place. But I would take lots of trips. To New Zealand, to Brazil, to Japan, and South Africa. I’d spend the summer in Vermont, basking by the lake, doing gardening, learning crafts and making art. I used to love art, and think I could love it again.
My book club last night was with 3 retired women and they all spent time showing me their crafts: knitting and beading and decorating. They talked about the flow of it, which I never get with my own work. I got so excited by this idea of having flow, which once again I read about when I was nineteen and aspired to have but never quite got it.
So for sure I’d focus on learning how to find flow, to savor an activity not because I think it will get me somewhere but just for the sake of doing it.
I was having a conversation with a friend last weekend about how much expectation I’ve had of myself over my lifetime, and it was always with the best intentions: appreciating very early on this was the one life I got and so I had to make it count, see how far I could go. But now of course I wonder if I spent too much time thinking that going far was about having other people perceive that, in a way that other people’s perceptions were the only true yardstick of achieving. It’s quite another thing to wonder what you, if you were the last person on earth, would feel is worth achieving, if there was no one around to perceive it.
So in a way this ‘only one left’ attitude cuts out needing to create or art, since a lot of art is about expressing yourself to others. But there’s still a lot of room for understanding things, paying attention to things you haven’t paid attention to before.
Then again, this jubilee year won’t be by myself. I do think that’s what I’m after. I know I crave company, the opinions of others. I was waiting in the car with my son yesterday for an orthodontist appointment and I remarked to him how much I love looking at people and imagining their lives. A rather gaudily dressed middle aged black woman was walking by looking very tired, but her holding her head high. Meanwhile a young twenty-something guy, skinny, dodgy-looking, dressed in black, walked in the other direction. I had no idea what they were thinking, if I’d want to really know what they were thinking, but the whole universe of their lives suddenly became very interesting because it was clearly so different from my own.
Maybe a jubilee year really will be about understanding and truly empathizing with others, rather than just watching them.
— siobhan
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