I’ve spent much of the first two months of my five-month sabbatical moving from our old apartment to a new rental. Surprisingly, this has proved to be one of the best things I could have done with my sabbatical. Before we moved to Silicon Valley, we had moved five times in ten years, and each time we moved I was starting a new job or a new graduate program, and I didn’t really have time to unpack. But for this move, I actually had time to do things like go through old files and get rid of papers I no longer needed — in the past two weeks I’ve recycled (or shredded and composted) enough old, useless paperwork to fill a four-drawer file cabinet. I got rid of hundreds of books that I no longer need or want. And I’m getting rid of other belongings, too.<\/p>\n
In our consumer society, it’s too easy to accumulate more belongings. You don’t need to spend lots of money purchasing new things at the store or online — we have accumulated many of our belongings at the thrift store or yard sales or through Craigslist, or even by trash-picking. (And with paper being so inexpensive, it is far too easy to accumulate files and paperwork.) All these things become a sort of spiritual dead weight; they can weigh you down slowly and stealthily so that you don’t even realize that you’re no longer able to move freely.<\/p>\n
With all I’ve gotten rid of, I still have too many things. I’m working on getting rid of more stuff; it’s a kind of spiritual exercise at this point. I do have a couple of research projects that I’m working on during my sabbatical, that I’m not talking about right now, in case they don’t pan out; but even if those research projects don’t pan out, getting out from under the weight of too much stuff would constitute a successful sabbatical.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve spent much of the first two months of my five-month sabbatical moving from our old apartment to a new rental. Surprisingly, this has proved to be one of the best things I could have done with my sabbatical. Before we moved to Silicon Valley, we had moved five times in ten years, and each … Continue reading “Sabbatical report”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[962],"class_list":["post-6496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meditations","tag-craigslist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6496"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6497,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6496\/revisions\/6497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}