Often the best outcome of the sabbatical experience is returning to your job uplifted, energized and recommitted. At the core of this payoff is re-discovering true passion. For it is passion that fuels creativity and energy, propelling us forward with a sense of purpose and self-identity.
Admitting we have lost passion for our work isn’t easy. Maybe we don’t understand how it happened or what it means for our future. Work is a crucial identity provider and any ripple in passion confronts us with the question - What am I here for?
I found it refreshing that author Elizabeth Gilbert revealed that her passion for writing – “the only one pursuit that I have every truly loved” – left her high and dry after the success of Eat, Pray, Love.
Gilbert has few passions but the one identified early on – her writing – meant she never had to search for her destiny. “I only had to obey it,” she stated.
But once she lost the passion she wasn’t all that good at writing. Attempts for another book were disastrous. “The book was crap and I couldn’t figure out why.”
Feeling shocked and stumped, she worried. “This was terrifyingly disorienting. I couldn’t begin to know who I was without that old, familiar fire. I felt like a cardboard cutout of myself.”
Enter an old friend with sage advice - advice you often hear at yourSABBATICAL.com - “Take a break,” her friend Sarah told her.
Gilbert stopped writing altogether and got her hands dirty in the garden for six months. When autumn came – and she was pulling up spent tomato vines – she was reunited with her passion. She sat down at her writing desk again. Three months later the final version of Committed was complete.
If you’re struggling to understand why the career you so loved isn’t giving you joy or you’re struggling to find the high energy you’re accustomed to - back off temporarily. Slow down and find an unrelated endeavor. Ask yourself, “What am I curious about?” “What would I like to learn to do?”
If passion is a towering flame, then curiousity is a modest spark that can summon up a modest something according to Gilbert.
When love for your career is dying, the reason unapparent, the most devastating choice is to go idle. Never mind if your firm doesn’t have a sabbatical program or you’re not sure whether you can negotiate one, you still have weekends and the ability to squeeze out a couple of hours in your week for mini-sabbaticals. So forget the excuses. What can you do to try something completely different?
While Elizabeth Gilbert’s roots are in journalism — she’s a Pushcart Prize-winning and National Magazine Award-nominated writer — it’s her books that have granted her even more attention.
Gilbert departed from reporting in 1997, with the publication of her first collection of short fiction, Pilgrims. A finalist for the 1998 PEN/Hemingway Award, Pilgrims was also selected as a New York Times Notable Book, was listed as one of the “Most Intriguing Books of 1997” by Glamour magazine, and went on to win best first fiction awards from The Paris Review, The Southern Review, and Ploughshares.
Since then, Gilbert has successfully alternated between fiction and nonfiction — a high-wire act that has paid off in a string of critically acclaimed bestsellers that includes her first full-length novel, Stern Men (2000); The Last American Man (2002), a National Book Award for Nonfiction; and Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia (2006), a celebrated spiritual memoir that landed on several year-end Best Books lists.
Elizabeth’s fifth book - Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage was published in January 2010. Gilbert lives in rural New Jersey with her husband and now, a garden. She is at work on a new novel.
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