Sabbatical 10

Of course I decided to end it neatly, as predicted last week, ten weeks in. A final edition (of this run) of Sabbatical to mark closure on ten restive, restorative, and reflective weeks of chosen unemployment, and give myself a final proper break for the last few weeks before 2023 begins, and with it a new job.

Of course there will still be writing - the traditional end of year look back on all things 2022 and stupid lists you’ll never read about what I read and listened to, etc. And the comics I hope to continue weekly too. And there will be future ‘issues’ of Sabbatical too. Probably when whatever I do next comes to an end and the Sabbatical life begins again? Maybe before? It’s a good stupid word and I like to use it. Maybe all future posts on this blog will be issues of Sabbatical? Time will tell. All I know is that I’ve been trying not to dwell too much on the future lately, or the past, and stay more present in the moment.

It’s true. I’m not actually a Buddhist, and there’s a lot to mindfulness that I’m wary about, but since about 2015 I’ve used it as a tool every now and again to keep anxiety at bay and feel a little more peaceful in my life. For the last twelve days I’ve been doing it daily again - just ten minutes - and have been finding it really helpful. A little self-help moment of calm in my morning. I meditate, and I read sections of various different books shilling ideas of a better life. The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman; At Home In The World by Thich Nhat Hanh; The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté; and The Happy Me Project by Holly Matthews. I don’t necessarily agree with everything these books are saying - especially the Stoic stuff - but it’s all ways of reminding myself that some of the way you see the world is your own doing and alternative visions are possible. I find it calming and thought-provoking, and a nice change from the rest of the day full of political rage and social despair.

Of course there is an intrinsic paradox to the idea of being in the present - the moment you choose to do it, you have made a choice born from looking towards the future (wanting to be present again) and that choice is supposed to be beneficial. Which means it can be beneficial to not stay in the present and think about the future. But I think the philosopher’s desire for total coherence is a symptom of a dominating culture that seeks hierarchy and order. Messiness, incoherence, and contradiction might be the core component of all good thinking. Consider anarchism - decentralised, hierarchy-free, no gods no masters…but to get there you have to first choose to give assent to the idea of anarchism and the idea that all these things are goods. So there is some sort of higher-order idea, even when the idea is to eliminate higher order ideas. But that is nothing an anarchist wouldn’t happily agree to. The idea itself, once accepted, dissolves itself. The thought is dynamic rather than static. Like life - it is always fluid and changing.

Maybe I am a Buddhist?

This week I have continued making great strides in THE BIG RESEARCH AND WRITING PROJECT, getting down in the weeds with academic literature on justifications for punishment and prisons, specifically ideas of deterrence and incapacitation, and demolishing them within the framework of my wider argument. Next week we’ll becoming to the big scourge - retribution - and most of the heavy lifting will occur over the next few weeks before I tap out for Christmas. It is astounding how weak the standard justifications for prison really are, and how blinkered so much of the discourse is by ideological assumption.

Speaking of which, I’ve been hired to run a webinar on ideology and philosophy with some students on Monday, which I’m really looking forward to.

Teaching again has been at the forefront of my mind when not buried in books this week. Thursday was my ‘handover day’ at the school I will be working at from January so I’ve had lots to think about for the coming term(s) and the pure fantasy of the job now has some concrete substance to it. It was really nice meeting the department, seeing some of the students again, and just getting a continual good vibe from the place. Some radical differences from the last place I’m really looking forward to starting there. A good sign, considering I now have a ‘To Do’ list a mile long and know just how busy I’ll be come January! It didn’t make me run, nor did it make me worried. It just made me eager to get stuck in. And I was very happy to discover there were no horrible parents evenings or big after school events waiting for me on my birthday. When my wife got a new job a few years back, as head of a boarding house somewhere, it turned out the big winter ball they had scheduled a year before was taking place on my birthday. My first weekend birthday in years, and the only weekend birthday for a long time due to a leap year stealing the subsequent Sunday one. She had to spend all day prepping the ball, and then the evening was spent (together at least!) at a party for a bunch of teenagers. Not ideal! But you never know what you’re walking into when you take on a role and all the planning was done by someone else. You get what you’re given and have to make do. Mindfulness helps. It’s like this Philosophy Conference I’ve been working on with the fledgling Association of Philosophy Teachers in June next year (Monday 26th). I suddenly realised that I’ve been organising it and assuming I’ll attend it, but now I actually have to request the time off because I’m no longer free. Luckily, the whole point of it is for it to be essential CPD for teachers of Philosophy. If I wasn’t now working at the school, I would be recommending that they send someone to attend. So I think I’ll get the OK.

Beyond working on my research and working on my upcoming work, both in January and next week (a busy time ahead: the webinar on ideology plus a podcast record and a bunch of mock interviews to do), I’ve spent a lot of this week getting to grips with new social media platform (to me), Mastadon. I wrote a thing about the differences between there and the declining - perhaps soon-to-be-dead - Twitter (as I write this #RIPTwitter is trending and the offices are closed) for this week’s Philosophy Unleashed, but what’s been most interesting has been how, after just a few days of being there, the old world of Twitter - and most other social media - has just fallen away and new norms and habits have formed, based on community, communication, sharing, and proper conversation, rather than chasing clout and trends or getting lost in the shuffle as others chase those ephemeral aims. This week I have had great chats with fellow punks, sharing music with each other, and I’ve also had some individual conversations with people on a wide range of topics. I’ve also put a callout to the global philosophy community about diversifying and decolonising the UK A-level philosophy curriculum and started getting some good replies. It actually feels like social media on there instead of commercial noise. It was really nice to pop back to Twitter or go to a news website and realise how removed the conversations on Mastadon are from the conversations we are supposed to be having if we’re being led by trending news-cycles. It is an optimistic reminder of the power of transformation - how if you change the structure and the norms, all kind of alternatives to what you currently have become possible.

It certainly influenced this week’s playlist with some of the cool suggestions of music:

I’ve also really enjoyed the accessibility of it, and anti-ableist attitudes that seem to prevail. Things like capitalising hashtags so that screenreaders can distinguish individual words (i.e. #fuckthesystem becomes #FuckTheSystem) and putting all your hashtags at the end so that it doesn’t disrupt the flow of those screenreaders (because putting hashtag hashtags in the text makes it read weird when hashtag visually impaired people are trying to read about your love of hashtag punk hashtag philosophy and hashtag anarchism…whereas if you put them at the end of post they get to read the text uninterrupted but still locate or follow the post via hashtags. #hashtags, #VisuallyImpaired, #punk, #philosophy, #anarchism). There is also a cool feature to describe images you post too. Just little things that make a world of difference to people and remind us that ‘disability’ is actually usually society’s inability to adapt and a choice it makes to keep things inaccessible. The physical difference doesn’t create the obstacles, we do.

Anyway - the in-laws are visiting this weekend, so we have to pretend we live in a tidy and well organised house instead of the true squalor and chaos that is our actual habitat. That means I’ve got a lot of cleaning to do today as well as wanting to get back onto THE BIG RESEARCH AND WRITING PROJECT after yesterday’s day off for the handover day at the school.

Doing this Sabbatical project has been so fun and so helpful to me. I hope it has been interesting for you guys too? If it had been a paper ‘zine, cobbled together week after week until today, I would have been excitedly compiling them all together and finding somewhere to print a few off of the whole ten ‘issues’ despite having no clear intended audience or place to sell them. It’s amazing how easy it is to bring into reality concrete things motivated entirely by a fantasy nostalgia for a world which never existed. I still imagine, all-too frequently, that the Birmingham punk scene I played a part in when I was much younger still exists today and that I am still a part of it. The venues have been knocked down and gentrified, the bands have broken up or moved on to new projects, the ‘zines no longer exist, yet I still feel like, on any given night, I could go down to The Old Railway in Digbeth and it would all still be there. The funny thing is though, at the time, the scene I imagined when I was actually there was another fantasy: California in the 1980s. Dead Kennedys shows and police brutality. On the road with Black Flag. Hanging out at Okie Dogs with NOFX. Bad Religion before the harmonies. Believing in that fantasy world helped manifest the 90s reality we put together in Birmingham: our attempt to build something ourselves. Keeping that fantasy alive of what we had back then, and didn’t fully appreciate until it was gone, I hope, might just well help us build the next great thing. Something wonderful and fleeting that, again, we won’t realise the true brilliance of until it is gone.

When I decided to quit my job in January, I wrote the following on Philosophy Unleashed:

It’s not that the grass is always greener on the other side, but the grass is new grass on the other side. Different grass. A change of grass after sitting in the same field for so long. There is a reason that, be it Buddhist or Hindu notions of samsara, the Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence, or the Hollywood hell of Groundhog Day - endless repetition is something a diverse array of thinkers agree will eventually motivate us to break free.

Again, maybe I am a Buddhist?

I don’t know about that, but I do know that I was right. That shaking up the monotony of the last eleven years and spending these last eleven weeks free to do anything, everything, and nothing instead of the old daily grind that hadn’t changed in so long has been a wonderful privilege. I was afraid I might, too, miss what I’d had once it was gone, but I didn’t. The elements I missed I have been able to re-find and refine. But there was so much I do not miss, and I am all the better for being free of it. The different grass I have found here smells freshly cut and glows green with fertile promise. But what I’ve learnt mostly is just how many different fields there are all around, each with grass of their own, rich with different colours and smells. And, importantly, just how easy it is to pass from field to field once you realise that every fence is climbable, no matter how much barbed wire they try to put up.

Consider this project then - this Sabbatical - my gift to you. A stile you can carry with you in your mind to find passage from wherever you are to wherever the grass is greener. Something to disrupt the borders and boundaries and slice through the razor-sharp barbs and bring you new possibilities.

The courage to say no, and do something different. To tap out and start again. And to not be worried about discovering, just like Dorothy Gayle, that the thing you were looking for was in your own backyard the whole time.

I will start January 2023 much as I started January 2022 - as a philosophy teacher and head of a philosophy department - and yet everything will be different, because I took the time to find out what needed to change.

I was asked yesterday by one of the school heads if I felt ready for the new term? I answered honestly: ‘it’s all too much to really take everything in and I’m sure I’ll mess up and make a lot of mistakes. But I’m at peace with that and think I’ve done as much as I can today to mitigate against as many of those inevitable messes and mistakes as possible, limit how many there’ll be, and recover quickly enough when they do happen. So yeah. I think I’m ready.’

Shit - I think I really might be a Buddhist!

Until Sabbatical run #2 occurs further down the road, or until my next blog post, or until the next Philosophy Unleashed post, or my next song, or my next post on whatever social media of mine you follow…whenever we next meet, it’s been real and I’ll see you soon enough. For now though - time to take a sabbatical from Sabbatical.

I’m off to play in the grass.