I read an intriguing post on The Improvised Life blog about taking sabbaticals and what (aside from jobs and money!) keeps us from taking time off to dream and imagine and explore other paths. She posed the question, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”  Is it doable if we want it enough? I’ve always longed for a sabbatical that someone else paid for, but that has really gotten me no closer to time off, so now I’m thinking about how I can pay for my own sabbatical. A friend of mine suggested that society should start thinking of the first year of retirement as a sabbatical, a deliberate and planned pause instead of a full stop. A pause for renewal before starting the next phase of your intellectual life versus thinking you’re being put out to pasture. But I wish we could all, no matter where we are in life,  have periodic sabbaticals that are kairos intervals, in the sense of holy time or a special time of opportunity. Creating an inviolate, sacrosanct time for ourselves in which to reflect, read, walk, write, regenerate is just as important as taking the kids to Disneyworld, heading south for spring break or having a frantic, antic Christmas. Tell me: What would you do if you had a year off, where would you go and what would you do if you weren’t afraid?

It’s very quiet here tonight in Fridaville because I accidentally hit some invisible Darth Vader button on the side of my flat screen TV that made it go haywire. I can’t turn it on or off — it’s in TV limbo — and no matter what buttons I push, I get the message above. So who do you call when your TV has a mental breakdown? It used to be a TV repairman, but they are as extinct as the wooly mammoth. The next option is to set up an appointment with Comcast and take half a day off work waiting for them to arrive. “Oh that’s okay, I have a trust fund and nothing better to do, so I can leave work and hang around waiting for your guy to show up within the allotted frame of time–or not.” Or the other choice, after stomping around, changing batteries in the remote (which I had to steal from my vibrator) and feeling the blood pulse in my eardrums, is simply to do without TV for awhile. Maybe the “weak or no signal” is my signal to read, write in a jounal, work on storyboarding a little movie, clean out a desk drawer, take a walk when it’s warmer, visit a friend on Thursday to catch 30 Rock, make soup, draw, listen to the silence, play some moody Miles Davis, put a 30 minute hot oil pack on my hair, take a photo, order something extravagant online, watch Hulu.com or an instant-play Netflix movie, write a haiku, put the batteries back in my vibrator, glue something in my journal, call my daughters, load cds onto iTunes, take a Lynda.com online class, exfoliate. I grew up without TV, but we had stories to tell in front of the fireplace, corn to be popped over the coals, sparks to fly and the dozy comfort of firelight instead of HDTV light. I can’t get that back, but maybe I can light some candles, tell myself some stories and bring a little of that slow winding down into bedtime back into my life. I don’t think it will be easy because I’m a thoroughly gadgetized, mechanized product of my era. I want my HBO, Bravo, Law and Order and Turner Classic Movies running while I blog or email. I’m already uneasy, unsure of what to do with myself, antsy, angsty and on edge. I kind of like it.

I found these shoes at Urban Outfitters and what I love about them, aside from the cheap price, is that they look broken in and beamed here from a more romantic era. As if they were worn by Zelda Fitzgerald in a night of mad dancing and packed away and stored in a trunk in an attic until they showed up in a Paris flea market decades later. As if they were danced in all night, leaving a trail of sequins behind on a snowy street in Montmartre, like breadcrumbs the owner’s lover would follow to her garret apartment overlooking the rooftops of the city. As if they were left behind during the German occupation of Paris, shoved to the back of a closet by a fragile Audrey Hepburn look-alike in her haste to flee to London, where she worked on the Enigma decoder until the liberation. As if they were handmade for a famously reclusive ballerina, lined with linen and lavished with sequins to match her legendary amber eyes. Every time I put them on, I’m imagining another life I could have lived, a path those shoes could have taken.