Starting the journey...

These doodles are an attempt to record my experiences during this never before sabbatical that I am taking. How did this take shape? The blog, not the sabbatical. When I was talking about this sabbatical proposal with my writer friend of mine, Meenakshi, she suggested that I go ahead and record every bit of it and who knows, at the end of it, one might have something interesting developed there. Hmmm, it made immense sense, my sabbatical was the talk of my office and folks there still found it too incredible to believe. Soon I started hearing stories like I’m getting married and I’ve got this really super paying job now. Against it, my sabbatical story seemed to dwindle in the reality scale and people automatically began to reject it. Even outside of my office world, a sabbatical is not an infrequent phenomenon and always generates enough and more talking points.

Considering my day-to-day life has largely revolved around some structure that I’d manage to minutely plan, this time around, there is no plan. I use the word day-to-day deliberately, drawing close parallels to the penny wise, pound foolish phrase – not at all in the economic sense [there, I’m all foolish] but referring to life itself. I go with the flow and don’t strategize and fantasize about important milestones and their corresponding timelines. My skill level in handling ambiguity ranks pretty high and this helps me adapt to life’s ever changing and shifting sands. However, in everyday life which happens between the important milestones, my planning does fairly good justice to my programme and project management skills and life goes clock-work. People who interact with me during these times would consider me fanatical about planning things. Hence, the comparison to the pennies and pounds.

Anyway, this isn’t a thesis on my personality type, though substantial amount of work has been done in that region. To cut a long story short, this time I don’t have a plan – for the first time, there is no structure to focus my world around. And my walk just now on that long dwindling path of pennies and pounds was just an extension of my intention to take the time to smell the roses along life’s path, u’know, to linger around for sometime before getting to a destination or the root of the matter, in this case.

This recording of events would help give me some perspective on how things are transpiring. Writing things down would give me a sense of the road travelled so far. Not that I’m structuring my journey, but in a way, it’s like a quasi structure – so, I’m not looking ahead and planning things but I’m looking back to see if I’m liking whatever I’ve done so far. It might be directing the flow ahead to things I want to do, but all the same it’s not a tangible structure.

Having said that, I’m not cheating on the flow. It’s almost a fortnight since I’m on this sabbatical and I’ve not planned a single thing. I’ve had loads of fun, doing an interesting mélange of things. That was the free falling bit. Now, as I’m moving into the next phase, I’m introducing some tags around the flow. If I’ve managed to hook your attention amongst this waterfall of myriad thoughts and confusing cues and somehow you can understand what I mean, let’s get on with the flow, mate!