Hello from a future I really wasn't expecting the last time I wrote anything on here that wasn't a monthly round-up - that is, about the sabbatical I've been planning...

I've been looking forward to taking a sabbatical for a few years now. I've long thought they were good things: a chance to have a solid break from the norm. I knew that I was coming towards the end of a season in my life and work, even before I started the discernment process for ordination, and knew that I wanted a proper break before whatever was to come next. I also wanted the chance for another good length trip if I could afford it: I love travelling, and I knew that having a longer time somewhere would allow me to rest and explore, as well as revitalising me, with all the new and exciting things.

By January, I'd decided I was going to go somewhere for 2-3 months, and had a few ideas. I looked at a number of options - farmstays in Italy, various houses and retreats with Christian foundations and organisations - but nothing quite fitted with dates or the writing I wanted to do. So I decided I would see if I could find an airbnb or house-sit or something for a couple of months, and then travel around.

By the end of February I'd decided that I was going to go to Canada. I would spend a couple of months in one place working on a book idea and hopefully getting to know some people and actually live in a place, and then have a month holidaying around. Nova Scotia was the top pick (COASTAL, SPACE), but I was also exploring whether I might be able to find some cheaper accommodation through friends of friends in Vancouver. Still, I'd pre-ordered the new edition of the Lonely Planet for Nova Scotia, made a spreadsheet, and starting dreaming of seascapes and fjords.

And then... BOOM.

The world as we knew it imploded, with the result that I'm spending my sabbatical living with my parents in rural west Cornwall, trying to work on a book, do some theology pre-reading, and not worry too much about what the heck training for ordination is going to look like come September.

In a way, it's funny: I wanted to be somewhere for a chunk of time, I wanted to be rural and coastal and to have time to write (and make time for it, when travelling); I wanted to rest, and to get to know a community. I have a lot of that in Cornwall. And yet here I am, somewhere between bitter and resigned.

In a lot of ways I'm extremely lucky. I hadn't booked anything for the long trip yet, I have been able to move as planned, I'm financially solvent. And as friends remind me, a lot of people would give their back teeth for three summer months in Cornwall without having to go to work. It's also hard. I know very few people in Cornwall nowadays, so now that lockdown is easing, I don't have many friends to see. Equally, now is not a good time to be trying to meet new people or getting involved in community life, as so much is shut down or tightly restricted.

But the thing I'm finding most difficult is the sense that I'm *wasting time*. I spend a lot of time staring into space - be at at the page of a book, the computer screen, or the bottom of the garden. I pet the dog, especially when she's tired and cuddly. For all I've tried to build a pattern of writing and reading in preparation for training, it still feels like I'm pottering aimlessly through my days. In some ways, I'm doing exactly what I wanted - reading, writing and resting in a beautiful place. But I'm also not. Cornwall isn't new to me, it's home. And so, instead of the rejuvenating frisson of exploring a new place, I feel like I'm treading water, wasting my precious sabbatical - a time I may never get to have again.

It feels foolish and ungrateful to be lost like this, given how much the pandemic is hurting some; not to mention that feeling my feelings feels self-indulgent and yes, time-wasting. And I am that most twenty-first century create: a person defined by productivity. Even, it turns out, on sabbatical.

Re-reading my journals from the past few years, it turns out that a defining theme has been an on going wrangle between me and God for control of my life, in which I keep getting informed I'm going to have to actually do the things I've been saying I think are *good* but have only been taking fairy-steps towards. I've spent a lot of the past two years of work talking and writing about sabbath and jubilee, about rest, returning, and resetting. Now that is pretty much exactly what I've been forced to do, and when I pause and feel what that feels I don't like it very much.

I imagine an enforced period of un-productivity may turn out to be the break from the norm I needed. It sure as hell wasn't the one I wanted, and right now, I'm a bit off a crosspatch about it.