Post-Sabbatical Blues

The title sounds like a song from Neil Young's On the Beach album.  I am slowly rounding into shape, intellectually and emotionally (and hopefully physically, despite my creaky back), from my year away from Champlain.  It took me about two weeks to get beyond the notion that I was getting ready to get on a plane to go "home" to Abu Dhabi.  Now I'm working on truly immersing myself into the life of a professor.  I'm enjoying the teaching immensely, and my students have been great.  It's fantastic to teach and follow where the moment takes you, and, as I've mentioned before, it is exhausting, especially for me, to continually self-censure every word and thought.  There is a profound difference between having a filter and worrying about saying the wrong thing and being put on a plane out of the country that afternoon.  So, the teaching part of things has been great.  Rather, I'm slowly adjusting to the day to day grind of grading and committee meetings, and just daily life.  I've had a couple great discussions with my wonderful friend Trish about this, who had her own year-long sabbatical at the University of Jordan.  One does get spoiled while spending a sabbatical teaching overseas, especially in an area as interesting as the Middle East.  It's tough to face a pile (or in my case a cyber pile) of essays to grade when you're used to having the option of just saying, "what the hell, let's go to Beirut this weekend!".  That said, it's not something that demands, or has earned, a lot of sympathy from your friends.  Actually, my friends have been great, and much better than I thought they would have been (and I knew that would be supportive).  One of the things that study abroad folks have begun focusing on with their returning students is the inevitable blues during your first semester back.  It's great to see your friends, but they also don't really want to hear about your semester in Florence, and it can actually leave the returning students feeling more than a tad isolated.  It's certainly less of a problem for professors, partially because most of us have traveled a fair bit anyway and also because we should be more emotionally mature (not me, obviously, but others).  Still, I have run into a fair number of folks who, even though they initiated the discussion and specifically asked me about my best experience during the year, still have their eyes glaze over or get almost snippy when I discuss swimming with dolphins in Zanzibar or getting magnificently lost n San'a.  Luckily, and happily, I do have a number of really close friends who actually do want to hear stories of swimming with dolphins in Zanzibar or getting magnificently lost in San'a.  Even considering my good fortune on that front, I never bring any of it up unless I am asked, and only part of that relates to my own freakishly introverted nature.  All things considered, I think the transition back into the world is going better than I thought, even if I still drift off all too easily during faculty meetings to memories of Istanbul or Salalah or Beirut or Lisbon or Zanzibar or San'a.  The word sabbatical is drawn from the Latin sabbaticus, essentially a "ceasing", so maybe what I need is a sabbatical from my sabbatical.

Now, to be fair, the picture could have been taken before I left for my sabbatical.