Sabbaticalling

As In "Sabbatical Calling!"

Are you still a New Yorker when you no longer have a New York City address? Such is the question I’ve been posing to myself this week for the first time in almost twenty-five years. Last weekend, Tibi and I watched one set of very efficient movers haul away our furniture and boxes upon boxes upon boxes of stuff to load into a storage unit. Then we watched another set of very inefficient junk haulers take twice as much time to haul away a quarter the amount of stuff to be sold or thrown away. Then we watched our super and two of his colleagues load into our home of ten years and paint our bright yellow and green and blue walls back to a plain, lifeless white.

Before and after. The end of an era.

We had made so many memories in that apartment. We survived a global pandemic sheltered by its embrace, suffering our solitude with countless rounds of board games over Zoom and even more cocktails and glasses of wine with other friends hunkering down all over the globe. That apartment has hosted so many editions of our annual St. Nicholas party, where our friends and their kids piled into our bedroom to hear about the Alpine tradition of St. Nick as Tibi and I ran through our living room filling our guests’ shoes with candy, gifts, and a foreboding stick from St. Nicholas’ demon friend, Krampus. So many meals cooked and shared, so many hours of television watched, so many books read and conversations had. And it was all carried away and painted over in the course of a single day, ready for a new couple or family or group of friends to come in and make their own memories in that space—though certainly not with our flare.

It was time to say goodbye. Those ten years had left us ready for something new. One too many 3 am jam sessions from our downstairs neighbors had worn our patience as thin as the sound insulation in our pre-war pad. We may have stayed put for a decade, but most of the other building residents cycled through after one or two years, as is typical with many New York City rentals. The result was that we had grown up, but most of our neighbors had remained the same age—twenty- or thirty-somethings still seeking themselves, like so many before them, who came to New York City to find a new life. We had found ours already, the result being that the hours we kept rarely extended far past midnight. We knew it was time to move on the week after Christmas 2025, when Tibi’s parents had spent the holiday with us. One morning, we had breakfast and started decorating our tree around 9 o’clock. The next day, we found a note from our downstairs neighbors—a small commune of folks in their late-twenties—first thanking us for the Christmas cookies we had delivered to them, then explaining that they work late nights and need to sleep in the mornings, so if we could kindly not make any noise before noon each day, they would be very grateful.

Our time had come.

And we had the perfect excuse to leave. I was awarded tenure at the beginning of the 2025-26 school year, and one amazing benefit of reaching this milestone is that you get to take a sabbatical every seven years you remain at a university. It’s not exactly a vacation, but it’s a period where you don’t have to teach classes, serve on committees, or complete a lot of other administrative tasks that take up so much of a professor’s time so that you can read and write and complete research. Most take a semester off, as this allows you to retain your full salary. But Tibi and I have been dreaming of this sabbatical for a long time, and we planned to take the entire year. There would be a pay cut, sure, but it would give us the chance to travel for the longest period to date—14 months outside of the US, living wherever we want.

Planning for this journey has been half the fun. We envisioned every possible scenario. Should we spend the whole 14 months in one place? Or should we divide it up and travel to many? Should we go to new places? Or stick to places we already know and love? Some people create dream collages or Pinterest boards. Tibi and I just talked it all out, our mini-collective consciousness filled with this imaginary manifestation-scape.

In the end, we decided to use this sabbatical as an opportunity to stay long periods in several different places where we might consider moving one day. We’ve long felt the itch to live abroad. This would be a moment to scratch the itch, a bit, and to see which places felt most “right.” And we’d throw in a couple vacation spots, just for the fun of it—places we could never conceive of moving to, but that would just load us up with joy.

We’ll start in Buenos Aires, a city we’ve long adored, but haven’t been able to visit since 2022. Next, we’ll spend a month in our favorite Umbrian town, Spello, for a period of pure inspiration and relaxation. October through December will take us to London, a place to which we’ve long considered moving, given how much we love it. It also helps that we’ve been collaborating more consistently with the British government, so it presents some work opportunities, as well. After Christmas with Tibi’s parents, the first three months of 2027 will be spent amongst the atmospheric fog and church bells of our beloved Venice. April will be a month of discovering something new. Tibi and I have long loved the film The Hundred-Foot Journey, with the always-sublime Helen Mirren, this time as a snooty French restaurateuse. The film takes place in the most picturesque village in Southern France, and each time we’ve watched the film, we’ve talked about wanting to go. Well, last January on a vacation to Japan, we got a little boozy in a snug Tokyo cocktail bar, and this gave us the courage to look up the town, find an AirBNB there, and book it for a whole month, without doing much other investigating. So that will be truly an adventure. After that, Paris for two months, then a final month in the quaint Irish fishing village of Kinsale. Once it’s all over, we’ll return to New York at the end of July 2027 and have a few weeks to find a new apartment before the school year starts.

Typing it all out, it seems like a lot of moving around. But we won’t be anywhere for less than a month, and we’ll be in some places for three months. I don’t think it will feel quite so hectic when we’re in it.

We arrived in Buenos Aires about a week ago and have now settled into our beautiful apartment on the border between Palermo and Recoleta. It’s a funny experience to go from seeing the sheer bulk of stuff we’ve surrounded ourselves with over the last ten years in New York City as it is hauled away for the storage unit or the trash heap, then to pack our stuff into the confines of one checked bag and one carry-on, which will serve as our whole closet for the next 14 months. I suppose we can always buy something if we realize we need it…it’s not like we’re living in a village in the Amazon, the Central African Republic, or Siberia. Or perhaps this trip will make us realize how very little we actually need.

A steak dinner with our friend Eugenia on our first night back to a Buenos Aires parrilla

Before departing, we took a final trip to our upstate cabin, Bunbury Cottage, stopping along the way to visit my former professor and dissertation chair, Deborah, who has now settled in the Hudson Valley. She has just returned from spending the last handful of years in Abu Dhabi, where she worked at the NYU campus there before retiring. She wrote a gorgeous memoir called Taking Leave (which I highly recommend) about her experiences “away” as an academic. As I’ve been preparing to take my own leave, I’ve been thinking about her book a lot. Deborah writes:

…all leave-taking is a leaving from. And all leaving, including my own, is motivated. But not all people take their leave. Leave-taking is an act of volition, a deliberate possession of one’s own departure, a conscious abstention from what is often called fate. It contains a paradox, as the etymology of leave is, in fact, “to remain.” From the Old English lœfan (to allow to remain in the same state or condition), taking leave is also a staying in place, a pause in time and space that allows something else to emerge. To take one’s leave is to find home in a perpetually moving “residence on earth,” to invoke Pablo Neruda.

I’m looking forward to spending the next year or so embracing this paradox. If there is such a thing as burn out, I have definitely been approaching it. The responsibilities of having two jobs, co-administering a growing university institute, maintaining the academic output required to receive tenure and take a sabbatical, and dealing on a daily basis with the inconceivable capacity of human beings to do wonderful, but also terrible things to each other have worn me thin. I’m looking forward to the “deliberate possession of my own departure,” to finding inspiration and groundedness through the paradox of a more peripatetic lifestyle. To allow “something else to emerge”…and to see what it is!

I dropped the ball on maintaining this Substack for a long while now. I haven’t felt particularly inspired to write it because of all the things I just mentioned. But I’m going to try to pick it back up again. I have to write a couple books while I’m on this sabbatical, but I’m also hoping to make room for the joyful writing that this venue provides. After all, taking leave from some things allows new room for other things.