sabbatical reflections: my partner
25 Jan 2024my partner (hi das!) came for the third week of sabbatical and honestly? it was fucking magical.
i won’t get into ALL the nitty gritty details but i do want to share a few because they feel illuminating of some insights i want to capture.
timing
first of all, i think the timing of his visit was super ideal. we decided to have him come for the third of four weeks. it felt like the right amount of time for me to be there solo and settle into my own rhythm before he arrived. we also hoped it would give me time to work out some of the kinks of being up there in the yurts so that we didn’t have to worry about that stuff and could focus on being together and being on/with the land. and i think we nailed that. i had figured out the wood stoves for cooking and heating the yurts, how to handle water filtration for drinking and drinking, how to navigate into and out of the woods, etc. so yea, timing? check!
navigating how to spend the time
second of all, i felt really proud of the way we navigated how we’d spend the time. we had a conversation or two beforehand his arrival about how we wanted to be together and then upon his arrival we had another one or two. and it was just very helpful to get clear about things like overall structure of the days (ex: our desires around solo time, couple conversation time, bathing routines/desires, sexy time, land time, when to eat, when/if we’d make calls to other people and other partners/crushes, when to go out of the woods to get supplies, etc.) and how we wanted to be with our phones. once we’d sorted that stuff out at a high level, it felt easeful to move through each day. so time navigation? check!
adventure time
another highlight from our time was adventuring! since we’d had a pre-conversation about it, i knew before starting sabbatical that exploring and adventuring was some he wanted to prioritize during our shared time. though i didn’t pre-meditate this, the impact of knowing that was that i did relatively little adventuring on my own before he arrived. and that felt like a great stance! it allowed me to feel at ease prioritizing learning the land around the yurts and reading rather than exploring. it made me want to leave the exploring for when he arrived so that it would be novel for me, too. and it totally worked.
long uninterrupted conversations
one last thing to share: it was so fucking excellent to have long chunks of uninterrupted time to just talk. because we have a running conversations list, it was relatively easy to decide what to talk about when we had a long stretch and then we could just dive in. we had some really beautiful conversations including about our upcoming cohabitation experiment™️ how we want to invest in community, and some big picture thoughts about navigating separate and shared friendships in our separate yet interwoven lives. each of those convos was SO good and it was so different (at least different than our current flow) to have that much spaciousness for each one. given how we currently see each other (which is mostly on date nights or during day time hangs, many of which include other people), we are just in navigating the flow of life and work and though we certainly have lovely conversations, they’re generally sandwiched amongst doing dishes, driving back and forth to each other’s houses, figuring out day-to-day plans, and doing the ongoing daily(ish) check-ins and catchups about other things happening in our lives. anyway, it was just so nice, for example, to go for a multi-hour hike, and just get to talk and talk and talk without big concern for having to jump back into life. in some ways, the spaciousness felt akin to vacation vibes except even better somehow…
in summary, through one type of lens, all of this stuff is like… super basic. but, through another lens, what’s so special about this for me is the amount of resonance that exists (a) in the general types of things we desire and (b) in our way of being with the navigation/negotiation in the places where we are in dissonance. i just really dig it! and i especially dig that, during this sabbatical (which i worked up to for 5 years), it felt so easeful, joyful, and even beneficial for us to be together for 1/4 of it! what a time to be alive! 🥳
words / writing / post-processing
759w / 30min / 5min