When I was a kid, my father was always calling for “a little more elbow grease” at the job site. He was certain that elbow grease built character and guaranteed future success.
Here in North America, business leaders search relentlessly for ways to boost worker productivity and their own bottom lines. Predictions of a new age of more leisure time for workers remain just that.
Still, few of us — myself included — ever question the dignity and fulfilment of a regular job, no matter how dirty, demeaning or ill paying. We willingly hum the mantra that work is unfailingly good for anyone fortunate enough to have some to do.
How often were we baby-boomers told as children not to fear honest labour? Weren’t we warned that idle hands are the devil’s workshop? Duly advised to put our noses to the grindstone?
And now, in advancing middle age, we’re reminded at funerals that so-and-so always brought home the bacon and had a work ethic so enduring that he died with his boots on. Spare us all from a death in sloth and idleness, I say.
But must we work year in and year out until we drop dead one morning on a commuter train? Or stagger to the finish line of our working lives, only to collect a gold watch and ride into the sunset years, our physical capacities for adventure or travel much diminished?
Happily, I found out before it was too late that it’s possible to escape temporarily from my workstation, indulge in a few whimsies, and live to tell the tale.
My instrument for a whole year on the lam was a mid-career sabbatical, technically known as a Deferred Compensation Leave Plan.
My furlough came with no strings attached: a year off with a full year’s salary to spend and the written promise of the same job or an equivalent after I returned.
Thanks to a sound provision in the newspaper’s collective agreement with the unions, every employee is eligible for this outrageous bit of self-indulgence, with ground rules set by the federal tax department.
After considering the sabbatical idea for about 10 minutes while the ink dried on the new labour contract in 1995, I signed on for five years of work at 80 per cent of my regular salary.
As its part of the bargain, The Star set aside the other 20 per cent in an interest-bearing account, paying me (taxable) interest at the end of each year on the accumulating pot. After five years, it contained the equivalent of a year’s salary for what we called Project Millennium.
Sure, there had to be a few sacrifices. My family drove a smaller car and, with three grown-up children gradually heading out the door, moved into a smaller, mortgage-free townhouse, a manoeuvre sometimes called “down-nesting.”
But the hit to the family wallet from the forced-savings plan wasn’t as great as some might think. When your gross pay shrinks by 20 per cent, so do the federal and provincial income taxes you pay.
With the money angle covered, office farewells said, and the junk from my desk at One Yonge St. stored away in boxes, the experiment “Would I Lose My Mind Without Work?” began in earnest.
So, what was it like suddenly, NOT to work?
I remember the first morning. It was the day after Labour Day, an ironic calendar date for cutting the umbilical cord to work. Believe it or not, the sun rose as usual, a fine autumn morning in the suburbs. Birds sang. A Star thudded on to the front porch.
At 8 a.m., we were awakened by noise outside the open window.
“Is that the air conditioner, or what?” my wife Lynda asked sleepily.
“No, it’s just the sound of people going to work.”
I rolled over in bed to block the sunlight. Somewhat later (but not much), it was time to get up and read the paper.
Let’s be straight, though. Only a liar would tell you that hanging around the house, fiddling in the garden, doing odd jobs, reading novels, picking up the mail, shopping for leisurely dinners, listening to Molly Johnson sing “Monkey,” checking the hourly news, bottling homemade wine, and charting the annual collapse of the local professional baseball club are meaningful work substitutes.
They are not.
Such activities may be civilized, even necessary and fun. But they’re more work-like routine than sabbatical. Just killing time. I began to think of what a convict’s daily routine might be like by comparison.
Fortunately, we’d had those five years to decide what my wife (who also took the year off) and I would do when that much-anticipated day finally arrived. Hence, Job One: Build a canoe.
Why not? As anyone who has raised kids will attest, there never had been time to build one. But paddling A Great Canadian Cultural Icon was something we enjoyed, even as novices. Mostly, it just seemed a quintessentially Canadian thing to do, fashioning a canoe from Western cedar (if not the traditional birch bark and pine tar), even if we weren’t sure we could do it.
After all, this was a sabbatical. We could afford to be crazy. Besides, why buy a canoe, pre-built as it were, when you can build one yourself with help from Ron and Pat Frenette at Canadian Canoes, a canoe school/workshop/salon near Pearson International.
So, there we were at noon on the very first day, writing a cheque so that we could invest 100 or 150 hours on a rather intricate, albeit indoor, construction job. But, hey, we all need a little structure in life.
At the outset, Lynda suggested she’d mostly be dropping by from time to time to watch the canoe under construction. Within minutes, however, Frenette, the master canoe-builder, was showing her how to sharpen and use a spoke shave. Never having swung a carpenter’s tool, Lynda was hooked on canoe building.
To skip over the weeks of sweaty fun we had building the thing, I can report that, three days before Christmas, a gleaming 15-foot Ranger canoe nested in our freezing garage, where legions of festive-season visitors were invited (dragged) to admire the craftsmanship.
So it’s back to the grindstone now, a recent endorsement from our family doctor still ringing in my ears. With envy in his voice, he recently said our mid-career sabbatical was a good idea
The successful launch wouldn’t take place until July at Rockwood Conservation Area, near Guelph, where the boat sliced through the water like a dream.
Even before the boat was finished, we’d already started on other sabbatical activities that Lynda painstakingly organized over several months, scouring the Internet for things to do.
One of our early junkets was a two-week trip to Guatemala in November. There, we joined a group of 13 American volunteers helping to build 400-square-foot, four-room Habitat for Humanity homes in the shadow of a volcano near San Lucas Toliman.
The modest, concrete-block house we worked on most days was located in a village that was a half-hour’s drive from San Lucas. To get there, we stood in the back of a pickup truck.
As the earthquake-proof structure rose, course-by-course, we got to know the Tams, a hardworking family of nine who live in the two adjacent wood shacks, who would soon call it home.
Needless to say, the crude tools available on the mountainside worksite bore little resemblance to the spoke shaves, power sanders, planes and fine Japanese saws we’d wrestled with in the canoe workshop.
Some of us swung picks for foundation digging in the rocky volcanic soil. Decrepit hoes were used to level the floors for concrete. Also used as shovels, they filled ancient wheelbarrows with excess dirt to be hauled away. Some of the dented pails for hand-mixed mortar and concrete had wire handles and holes in their bottoms.
On a mountainside where coffee and corn grow in small patches and children carry bundles of firewood on their backs, folks weren’t looking for architects or engineers to redesign the Tam’s new house and build it to First World standards.
Grunt labour, not construction expertise, was needed.
So we sifted sand through a makeshift screen that kept breaking. We passed concrete blocks in chain gangs. We tied re-bar, struck mortar and generally did, as best we could, whatever “El Jefe” (the boss) Juan asked us to do.
Working at high altitude and under a hot Guatemalan sun brings out a lot in you, especially sweat. Never before this had I sweated through the thighs and knees of my jeans.
Each day, we drank the litre of water and can of pop that we took to the worksite. But our group was warned not to touch the local water, which, we were told, guaranteed at least one agonizing day in bed for our First-World guts.
Hard work? You bet. But fulfilling. Something we’d do again.
On the last afternoon, with their new home rising above the doorframes, the Tam family thanked our work group and presented each of us with gifts of needlepoint. I wasn’t the only one who battled tears as we said goodbye.
But don’t get me wrong. The sabbatical was a lark.
In October, we took a short trip to England, mostly Oxford but also London. In late January, we rode horses into a Costa Rican rain forest and stayed at Sabalo Lodge, a jungle retreat where you cool off hourly in a gurgling stream and watch monkeys from a lawn chair.
A few afternoons, I stuffed tools into a bag and headed to the dingy village school in Sabola, where a community work crew plugged a hole in the wall, installed an outdoor sink, put up blackboards, and built a bookcase out of rough-hewn cedar.
We spent March in Victoria, marching the scenic Galloping Goose Trail while checking out the lifestyle in the sometimes overlooked city that is said to be God’s waiting room, or, home to Canada’s newly wed and nearly dead.
And then there was the eight-week trip across Southern Europe, where we tracked the springtime scent of broom and saw bright red poppies all the way west from Greece through Italy and France, finally arriving in Spain to experience planted fields of sunflowers in bloom.
In Greece, we climbed the Acropolis in Athens and toured the quiet, rocky Aegean island of Chios, where Greek sentries still sit on the mountaintops, presumably keeping an eye on nearby Turkey.
In Italy, we rented a villa in the hills of Tuscany, sometimes hiking into the nearby town of Cortona on a narrow Roman road. We spent four days in a convent in Rome, not far from St. Peter’s Square. And we took a guided walking tour in Umbria, with great wines nightly and a couple of cooking lessons.
In France, we climbed aboard La Reine P*dauque for a six-day barge trip on the Burgundy Canal, slept several nights in the 12th-Century tower of a chateau winery, and spent a week in Provence, hiking more than 75 kilometres through the spectacular Dentelles de Montmirail.
Finally in southern Spain, our pace slackened for a few days at a small resort in the region of Andalusia, where bullfighting began in earnest.
Altogether, an amazing adventure.
The Parthenon by moonlight, cathedrals, castles, fine Vino Nobile wines, French cheeses, the Sistine Chapel, the Galleria Borghese with its Bernini sculptures and Caravaggio paintings. The performance of The Barber of Seville in Cortona. Testing my Alberta high-school French.
You name it, we probably did it in the seven foreign countries we visited. Weight gains were minimal, and we have enough photos to bore friends and family for hours at a stretch.
One friend, a Jungian analyst who has seen the snapshots, kindly offered his professional counsel on “re-entry problems.” I accepted.
So it’s back to the grindstone now, a recent endorsement from our family doctor still ringing in my ears. With envy in his voice, he recently said our mid-career sabbatical was a good idea.
Some people put together big post-retirement travel plans, the doctor said with a pause, only to get “tripped up.”
I think I know what he meant.
