How I Spent My Summer Vaca…I mean My Quasi Sabbatical

It’s 8:55 AM and the start of the new fall season is upon us. Yesterday was a very eventful day in the Carlson household. Sophia started middle school, Amy started her first day as a senior in high school, we put Pete on a plane back to Alaska after a three week visit, I took my 83 year old dad to the hospital for prostate surgery (very successful!) and I started sorting through how I spent the last three weeks as well as how I was going to spend the rest of my life. A pretty full day. But from talking to people, a day filled with events that are very common, in substance and quantity. We live very full lives.

I accomplished the travel I wanted, spent a lot of family time as predicted, but I didn’t get around to the study, reading and reflection that I hoped to. Several work/career transition projects popped up and were very productive, yet very time consuming. The abundance of family time, just time spent together and hanging out was very spiritually refreshing. I learned a lot about what was going on in my kids lives just by being with them. But from a study standpoint, I did do some reading, some recreational reading that turned into study.

“Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”

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My daughter had it as assigned reading over the summer and said I needed to read it since this guy talked about a lot of the things I talk about. So she gave me a copy (due to a redundant purchase) and I was going to make it my recreational novel reading. Well if any of you have read it, it is NOT recreational reading, at least not for me. I’m about two thirds through, I quit twice, and now I have difficulty putting it down. I could, and probably will share some of my thoughts on the book, but now is not the time. If you are interested, google it and you will get more opinions than you could imagine. There is even a full version of the text on-line, click here.

But I will give you a short excerpt from the book that gave me a lot to think about, and is something I think everyone could gain some insight from:

“You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.”

 

 

 So I’m back on-line, talk to you soon!