I took a 6-month sabbatical after working for 10 years. I dreaded going back to work but returned as a better employee.

Deciding what to do

In the months leading up to my sabbatical, I had slowly crawled, evening lesson by lesson, to learn passable Russian. My sabbatical would be a chance to immerse myself in the country.

The war started 18 months before I was supposed to leave. Spending time on Russian soil would be neither safe nor ethical, so I decided to go to places with large Russian-speaking populations instead.

I wanted to volunteer and do something working with the large Russian-speaking, new Ukrainian diaspora. I had spent time in Odesa during the pandemic, working remotely and taking a Russian lesson every lunch.

I decided to start in Moldova and contacted a few local and international organizations about a temporary position.

Making plans

My one-bedroom flat in South London was easy to sublet. I kept my belongings in storage inside the unit. I paid about £1,750 a month for my flat, including utilities, which rose to £2,050 that September. The subleasers paid £2,000 a month.

I had about £3,000 a month to spend and a budget of about £100 per day, which didn’t require me to dip into any savings and strictly came from my reduced salary.

I used part of a bonus from the previous year, about £5,000, as a slush fund. This was mostly for airfare, visas, and visiting family in America.

I was not backpacking. My budget gave me the flexibility to find comfortable accommodation and the best mode of transport.

Volunteering

On my last day at work, I set an out-of-office message for the far-off January 5, passing off every unfinished project to my colleagues. I deleted my inbox — it was the first time in 12 years that I had no ongoing tasks or projects.

Two days into my sabbatical, I was in Moldova and working at the Chisinau Dignity Centre, essentially a food bank run by the English charity Refugee Support Europe.

My work consisted of two basic tasks: ringing up groceries and verifying documents. The team consisted of a variety of local and foreign people. One person was studying to be a sailor in the Ukrainian merchant marines; classes were remote because of the war.

Instead of office gossip, we wondered about the stories of those who came in. One older woman, ceaselessly polite, would say her husband was “sleeping in the cemetery.”

We worked hard, but our labor seemed impactful. I made mistakes, but I was forgiven. I could see the impact of our work much quicker than on larger corporate projects with larger timescales.

I could have stayed, but there was a policy against volunteering for over a month. By mid-August, I headed south toward the Romanian border and continued by plane eastward.

On the road

For the next four months, I lived out of a duffel bag, traveling from the desert of Uzbekistan through snow-covered mountains in Tajikistan to dense urban Chinese cities. Friends and relatives joined me for a few sections, although I was mostly alone.

Life was pleasantly unstructured. I made radical changes to my planned itinerary and kept extending my time in the north of Kazakhstan to do things like attend a hockey match with a team from across the border in Russia.

I saw a remote area in the far north of China where a ski resort to compete with the French Alps is nearing completion. In the lobby of a Tajik Marriott, I was accused of being an intelligence agent when trying to make a conversation over a Negroni. It was exciting, random, and fulfilling.

Back again

For a long time, the trip seemed infinite. I hadn’t taken more than two weeks of holiday in over 15 years, and 27 weeks at the start seemed to stretch out forever.

I had a sudden momentum of existential awareness in the fifth month of the trip. There would come a time when I would be back sitting at a shared desk under fluorescent lighting in gray London. Did I miss the work? Honestly no, but perhaps that’s because I was beginning to forget what it was actually like.

I tried to put it out of my mind and tell myself it would be fine as the final weeks wound down. They were sweet — a wedding in central India, a week on the beach in Thailand, and nearly a month seeing friends who had children and couldn’t meet on the road.

And then I was back.

Something strange happened

It wasn’t after the first day back at work, as I collapsed on my now-strange couch after a surprisingly anti-climatic day. Nor was it in the first week when I had to reduce such a multifaceted experience into a few quick anecdotes.

Maybe it was three weeks in; definitely, by week four, something was different. The first potential new client decided to work with me, and then another. I had an unprecedented winning streak as if I was more in tune with people’s desires.

There were all the little bits of the job that I had forgotten in my desire to escape and be on the road. Tasks like a clever bit of writing and finding an elegant solution to a somewhat knotty problem brought me pleasure in a very different way from what I experienced on my adventures.

I would probably still rather spend most of my time high on a mountain than in the office, but the sabbatical gave me the reset I needed; it made me a better employee and person. I hope and plan to do this again later in my career.