A Non First Week

If I wasn’t on sabbatical, this would have been my first week of classes. I would be meeting new students and advisees, establishing the tone in my classes for the semester, training new research students, and attending start-of-the-year meetings. Campus would be abuzz with the rhythm of a new semester and new academic year.

But instead I’m continuing what I’ve been doing the last few months on the campus I’m visiting while on sabbatical – meeting new people, catching up with old friends in the area, making progress on learning a new area of research, and working on some continued research projects. This week I got over a new-research hump – I’m not bumbling as much – but there will be new humps to encounter! I’ve also started working on revising a manuscript after receiving reviewer comments. While I haven’t thought as much about teaching, I have had the opportunity to meet and interact with a few undergraduates. I notice that I automatically slip into ‘professor’ mode even though these are not my students!

This week, when a student asked me what I’m doing during my sabbatical, I told her that it’s the best time to learn something new and challenging, because one actually has the time to muddle around. She was surprised, and said she thought a sabbatical would be about resting! I told her she was right, and that I was taking the time to rest and enjoy my sabbatical, and that my so-called ‘work’ was at a leisurely pace; I have no deadlines or constraints. Perhaps I should have said that mixing work and pleasure can be a source of learning and creativity. I hadn’t considered this aspect until reading Mixing Work with Pleasure – My Life at Studio Ghibli by Toshio Suzuki. 

Over the years, I’ve enjoyed the artwork and story-telling of Hayao Miyazaki, so it was interesting to hear an insider’s view of how Studio Ghibli came to be, and the quirky personalities of Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. I discovered Miyazaki’s work back in the ‘80s through reading the serialized Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind. I learned from Suzuki’s book that the movie version became a catalyst in starting Studio Ghibli. I also learned about some of the unique circumstances surrounding the making of My Neighbor Totoro, and how it surprisingly spawned a burgeoning toy industry of Ghibli products. The toys are the largest money-maker while the movie, when it originally screened, had one of the lowest box office takes.

When I first became a faculty member, I kept a tight separation between work and life outside of work. I wanted to maintain a disciplined schedule, and not have work spill over into every corner of my life – there are other important things in the grand scheme of things. This has worked very well overall. But I wonder if I have curbed my creativity somewhat by not allowing the two spheres to mix. Now that I’m on sabbatical away from home, the two are mixing a little more. That’s made tracking my time a little more interesting, since my schedule has become more fluid. Previously I would confine my work to the time when I was at work. Committing to not bringing work home on evenings and weekend meant I had to be very efficient and not waste time when I was at work. And when I was away from the office, I did not feel I had unfinished work looming.

Given the leisurely pace of my sabbatical work, I don’t feel I have work looming, so perhaps this is a time to try mixing work and pleasure. My Non First Week may be a good kickoff for this experiment!