Sunday Box Talk – How To Take a Sabbatical

A Catherine Noon

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I’ve taken sabbaticals a couple times in my life.  While it’s scary to buck the accepted norm, doing so can teach you a lot about yourself and why you’re on this planet.

The first time, I was twenty-five.  I decided to make a solo climb on Mount Lassen, in Northern California.  I got nearly to the peak and sat down to take a break.  Looking south over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, I realized something:  if I followed what my parents wanted me to do, I’d end up where they were – and I didn’t want that.  I didn’t want a predictable, safe, corporate life.

I wanted to be a writer.

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was very young.  Unfortunately, writing isn’t one of those career choices that overjoy parents, particularly when their priority is to have the kind of offspring that they can brag about.  My mother died ashamed of my career choices, convinced that the life choices I made were going to send me down the path to failure.  Fortunately for me, by the time she told me that, I knew in my bones that being a writer was the right choice for me.

But to get there, I had to walk through fire.  At twenty-five, I ran my own department at a large corporation in Silicon Valley.  When I gave notice to quit, the Vice President – General Manager of one of the three main business units called me into his office.  He offered me the assignment I’d busted my ass to earn:  Market Research Analyst in a team that had offices worldwide – including Russia, which directly related to my bachelors’ degree in Russian.

I turned him down.

Instead, I moved north to the town of Mount Shasta.  We lived on fifty acres of forested land, seven miles out of the tiny town named after the mountain.  I worked in a local bookstore for a dragon of a boss, one of the first abusive bosses I had.  The torture was worth it:  I spent all my time writing or hiking.  In the year that I was there, I produced over fifteen hundred pages and learned a very important lesson:

Publishers don’t knock your door down with contracts to publish your book.

I realized that my next step was to get a good day job that would support my writing passion.  I moved to Las Vegas for two years, which was an awful idea.  Las Vegas is not the town for me.  I found Chicago.  I’ve been here ever since.  After working in the finance industry for almost ten years, I realized that I wanted to downshift, and took another sabbatical.

And now, I realized I have some ideas on how to make sabbaticals work.  I figured I’d share with you.

Five tips for a successful sabbatical.

  1. Be brave.  Be willing to face the possibility of failure.
  2. Lower your financial expectations.  You’ll be surprised what you can live without if you try.
  3. Learn to save.  Even if you can’t take a year off today, you can start saving money so you can do that when you want to.
  4. Shorten your timeframe.  I know a year-long sabbatical sounds romantic, but sometimes we just can’t swing it due to financial realities and family commitments.  If that’s the case, try swinging a weekend or two weeks’ vacation.  Get a hotel or even a youth hostel and work on your writing.
  5. Decide what your priorities are.  Do you want to be successful at your corporate job, working for someone else’s dream?  Or do you want to be a writer and follow your own pied piper?

Sunday Box Talk – The Purpose of Education

A Catherine Noon

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What’s the purpose of education? Nowadays, increasingly, it’s to get a job. It’s more about technical training than it is about educating the mind. And yet, with the proliferation of smartphones, always-on internet connectivity, and ever expanding inflow of information sources, we need the benefits that a good education bring more than ever before.

In classical terms, to be educated meant that one knew how to think. The discipline of thinking wasn’t just something one did; it required work, application, and skill. We’ve forgotten this skill, and that’s a bad thing. It used to be that an educated person would read certain pieces, in common with other educated people, and then engage in discussion about the ideas on those pieces. While the “canon” has been attacked as being male, white, and patriarchal, the ideas contained in it are as valuable now as they were fifty or a hundred years ago. There’s nothing wrong with studying the classical canon, and then adding to it all the rich heritage of minority and women’s voices.

One thing lacking in today’s environment is the ability to hold a competing idea in one’s head long enough to understand the other person’s point of view. We’ve lost the art of discourse. It used to be that one could listen to another person’s thoughts, digest them, and then either disagree or agree once one was certain one understood them. In fact, Mortimer J. Adler argues that one cannot truly agree nor disagree until and unless one has fully comprehended what the other has had to say.

Something else I’ve noticed is that we don’t have gatekeepers for incoming information anymore. It comes at us with the velocity of a fire hose, all the time. If we’re away from our computer, it comes to our smartphone. If it doesn’t come there, it’s on the television at the gas pump, (how offensive is that?). When my grandfather was alive, you would get a large newspaper on Sundays and the day was spent relaxing and reading – long – articles.  Now, news is delivered in soundbytes, and the average length of articles is 300 to 500 words – a blip when compared to articles from even just fifteen years ago.

So What Do We Do To Educate Ourselves?

There are many tools available to us.  Some of them are modern, and related to the internet.  Some of them are old-school, and related to how we control incoming information.

  1. Read.  A lot.  Whether it’s ebooks, traditional books, or Bartleby.
  2. Turn off the inflow.  Try it for one day a week – don’t go on the internet, social media, or your smartphone.  See what the real world has to offer you.
  3. Write.  Journal and get in touch with your own thoughts.
  4. Read about other smart people.  A couple awesome biographies are by Benjamin Franklin and Montaigne’s essays.
  5. Throw a party and talk about smart stuff.  Why not revive the Victorian tradition of the salon?  Have cocktails, snacks, and talk about the great ideas.

What about you, Dear Reader?  What do you want to learn?

Sunday Box Talk – Getting Back To Basics

A Catherine Noon

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Getting back to basics – what are the three boxes of life? It’s an idea from Richard Nelson Bolles, author of What Color Is Your Parachute. He points out that the three big boxes most of us deal with are education, work, and retirement. Bolles proposes something that’s nothing short of revolutionary – why keep the boxes in the traditional order of school when we’re young, then work for most of our adult life, then retire in our “golden years?” Why not mix it up a little?

I’ve talked about the idea of changing things up and the objections I hear amount to one thing: fear of challenging the status quo. What does following the status quo give us? Don’t reject it out of hand: predictability, stability, and familiarity. Those things aren’t trifles, and they’re not to be sneezed at. In times of great stress, usually it’s one or more of those three things that are impacted that causes all the stress. Why would we want to bring that about ourselves?

Here’s why: when we do things out of order, such as work as youth, or go back to school in later years, or take a year or six months off as a sabbatical, it teaches us things about ourselves that we would learn in no other way. By challenging the patterns that have become routine, it engages parts of our brain that aren’t usually in use as we go through life on auto-pilot. While it can be scary, it can be exhilarating and allow us to see things in new ways.

We also have a myth that we’re supposed to be good at something before we even start it. I can’t tell you how many people argue with me when I suggest they go back to school to study something that interests them. “Oh, I’m no good at such-and-such.” Being good at something is what you aim to be after education, not before.

If we open our minds to the possibility of changing around the order of things, what might happen? We might go back to school after forty, or fifty, or seventy. We might take a sabbatical and go live somewhere rural to study sustainable farming. We might take a gap year before going to college, to give ourselves time to cool off after high school and get some needed life skills.

What about you, Dear Reader? What might you try if you shook up your status quo?

Stash Sunday

A Catherine Noon

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Rachel and I wander around a lot, and as part of that, we search out local yarn shops, or what knitters like to call LYS’s.  During Rachel’s last trip here, we visited The Knitting Pot in Elmhurst, Illinois.  Rachel fell in love with some lovely overdye purple yarn, but there was only one skein of it.  It’s been sitting on my idea board for the last two months while I try and figure out what to make with it.

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I like Cascade yarns.  This is a nice, chunky yarn that’s soft and has a nice hand.  This colorway is interesting because it’s so understated, all plums and grey.  It’s a lot darker than it seems in these pictures.

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Here’s a shot of the back of the yarn band.  The colorway on the left tells you what the manufacturer’s color it is.  The lot number on the right tells you which batch it was dyed with, so that if you’re using more than one skein, you can make sure all the pieces are the same lot number.

Here’s the tough part:

I don’t know what to make with it.

So, here are my ideas:

  1. A stuffed elephant/truffle.  (A truffle is an imaginary creature that Rachel and I invented for our Persis series; it’s a cross between a cocker spaniel and an aardvark.)
  2. A lace table runner.
  3. This is currently my favorite:  an Amazeball.  Here’s my idea:  make a large ball, stuffed and cushie.  Send it to a friend when they’ve done something amazing.  They get to hang onto it, kind of like a trophy, until they feel like it’s time to pass the award on to the next person.  Ooh!  As I’m typing this, maybe include a pocket, and each person giving the award can write a note to put in the Amazeball to pass it along to the next person.
  4. A set of tree ornaments.
  5. Use it in a woven piece where I wind on a continuous warp, and use this as one of the weft pieces.

What about you, Dear Reader?  What would you make with it?

Sunday Box Talk – The Toolbox

A Catherine Noon

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“Success doesn’t come to you, you go to it.”
– Marva Collins

It’s easy to lament the things we don’t have yet. The media bombards us with images of more successful, more slender, more athletic, more successful people every day. New media come online every day, methods of distracting us from ourselves: even the dollar store as the “dollar store radio network” to talk to you while you hunt for bargains. Is it any wonder we feel bombarded? Or, worse, bad about ourselves because we’re not where we want to be?

I offer a thought for a beleaguered mind: gratitude.

Give thanks for the good that exists in your life, right now. Even if there doesn’t seem like much you could possibly be grateful for, the fact that you are alive and reading this newsletter is enough. Imagine if you were in Baghdad right now, sitting in the bombed-out shell of your temple, trying to pray with the sounds of mortars booming in the distance? What if one hits your neighborhood? The fact that we live in relative peace and calm, pursuing making a living and our hobbies, is a subject we can offer much gratitude for. Sure, not everything is perfect. But much of it is good.

Try numbering a sheet from one to ten, and write down ten things you’re grateful for. See if you can’t go past ten. How do you feel?

Now I propose that we become pilgrims on the path to self. We will do this together, side by side, shoulder to shoulder. Our tools are our bright minds and our love for each other. The first item in our toolbox is Gratitude. Learn to say thank you with an open heart. If you need ideas for how, go grab a copy of Sarah Ban Breathnach’sSimple Abundance, one of the best books written in the last two decades. Try her Gratitude Journal. Select a small, pretty book. Each night, just before you go to sleep, write down five things you are grateful for from the day. That’s all. Just five.

Saturday Stashbusting

A Catherine Noon

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I’m working on busting my ginormous stash.  In order to do that, I need to work on the projects I started.

The Stash List

  1. Block the Jewel Scarf
  2. My hat
  3. The red cable bag
  4. Line the Uglii Bag
  5. Bind off the Uglii Afghan; decide if I’m adding to it
  6. Buttons to the red blouse

This was originally a list of 5 things, but I realized I need to block the Jewel Scarf too, and that’s something I can do on Sunday.

Oh, and here’s Boria keeping the Uglii Afghan warm for me.  I know, I featured him a couple days ago, but it makes me laugh so I figured I’d share again.

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What about you, Dear Reader?  What’s in YOUR stash?

 

The Splish-Splash Page Hop

A Catherine Noon

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Bubble, bubble, toil and… welcome to the trouble!  It’s #NationalBubbleBathDay, and I’m joining my #NiceGirlsWritingNaughty sisters all weekend long to help celebrate with a steamy fun PAGE HOP!

Hello there.  I’m A. Catherine Noon, and I write hot-hot-hot stuff such as Sealed by Magic.  As part of the Page Hop, I’m giving away a copy of one of our books, either Sealed by Magic or your choice to one lucky winner on Sunday!  All you have to do to enter my giveaway is like my Noon and Wilder page on Facebook, here.

After you do that, be sure to comment below about YOUR fantasy bath mate below, so I know you’ve been by!  After you’re done, hop on to the next Naughty Girl waiting to say hello to you!  She is ANGEL PAYNE!

Friday Funnies

A Catherine Noon

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So.  What’s on YOUR social media plan?