Road Benefits

I’ve been on the road for a while now (see the last several posts, e.g. here), and it has been good for me. Why? Well, I think that it has been good to get out of some of the routines that I normally find myself in, and have a change of perspective. This feeds my thoughts about things, whether it be work-related, play, or personal life. So being in a mode where I’m living out of a suitcase and moving from location to location helps me simplify somewhat. Work has been good. Some aspects have not been as efficient as they might have been were I in my home office or in my office at USC, but efficiency is not really the point. There’s plenty of time for that later, and in travelling mode, the value of the high quality reflection about the work I’m doing or an approach I’m going to take on the project I’m working on is something I’d not trade for the equivalent time sitting in my office being highly efficient at some task.

So where am I? Well, I’m a month into hardcore sabbatical time (recall that the first month of the semester was sort of sabbatical-lite, since I was still serving on a search committee that meant sifting a high number of dossiers and reading acres of writing samples, and then there were various papers and other manuscripts to finish up, and a retreat to attend, and so on and so forth) and I’ve a better sense of the project I’m working on in terms of feasibility and scope. Still a long way to go to know what the final shape might be and in what precise manner it will come to be, but I don’t mind that. In fact, the development work itself (the main thrust of my sabbatical) is all about stripping away a lot of raw thoughts and ideas to see what shapes potentially lie beneath. I don’t know how long it will take, nor if it will succeed, but I’m going to enjoy the process immensely. I’ve already learned a lot, and am champing at the bit to do more.

I’m changing cities again as I type (the rapidly changing cloudscape in the sky is fascinating to watch as the train slices impressively fast through the countryside), and once I arrive and stow my travel bags it’ll be back on the job. It is such an adventure.

-cvj