4727

That's how many steps I walked today. My new fabulous tiny ipod nano (thanks Mum!), which clips on like my old shuffle and plays podcasts as well as music, contains a pedometer and so te tau okioki is turning out also to be te tau hikoi. (I even tried to experiment with te tau omaoma today, with hilarious but at least icebreaking effects.) The new sneakers have provided the inspiration I was hoping for and the plans to have a year of physical as well as intellectual recovery and strengthening are underway. But why do I feel like the 'non-intellectual' plans I have for my sabbatical year should be downplayed, kept to one side, 'done on my own time'? Aren't I a whole person? Certainly it's not only my brain which is exhausted at the end of my first 6 1/2 years: all of me is.

A few years ago the chaplains at Victoria Uni organised a conference called 'Critical Thoughts: Recovering higher education' in which people talked about the underlying purpose of universities, in order to challenge and find time away from the neoliberal 'educators as service providers' 'knowledge economy' perspectives that are the apparent logic of contemporary tertiary institutions. Prof Alison Phipps was a keynote from the University of Glasgow, and I remember being absolutely caught up in her spell as she spoke about the place of breath and rest in a scholar's life. This wasn't a case of wierdo time managment; it was a genuine and deep and carefully crafted reflection on the way in which scholarly life (and its holy trinity of research, teaching, service) depends on time to reflect, to read, to think, to explore ideas without necessarily needing to 'produce' an 'output' of a certain kind, to stare out the proverbial window.

I was particularly struck by the attention she paid to the ways universities use language in order to remove this kind of 'thinking' time: a key example is the word 'sabbatical' which is derived from the same word as the word 'sabbath.' The sabbatical is a period of rest following a period of work (even the proportions are Biblically derived: one year of sabbatical after six years of work) and Alison Phipps argued for (or at least this is what I think she was arguing for) a reflection on the notion of the sabbath in order to think about the purpose and scope of a sabbatical. So, the problem with universities renaming this magical year (and even reframing it; it's very unusual to get a whole year these days and much more likely to get 6 months at the end of every 3 years) something other than sabbatical is that we lose that memory of the purpose of the year which is buried in the genealogy of the word itself.

What are sabbaticals called these days? They're 'Research and Study Leave' in most places. RSL, a time for which you need to apply and for which you need to guarantee that you will 'produce' a certain set of 'outputs' before your RSL will be granted (granted either way: approved or funded). It's not that I don't genuinely *want* to do the things I've commited to in my RSL plans (my book Ghost Writers: The Maori Books You've Never Read is my main promised 'output' but also something I'm thoroughly enjoying and passionate about); I'm not saying that RSL should be a big old holiday so already-privileged academics can swan around every few years doing absolutely nothing or staring out the window. But this blog is subtitled 'the sabbatical diaries' rather than 'the RSL diaries' because even though my university thinks I'm on RSL, I think I'm on sabbatical. Sabbatical includes RSL, sure, but it's so much more. It's RSL with all of the gaps and time to reflect and holistic goals and life bits in the mix too.

Actually, I was emailing with one of my besties, Rawinia, today and she provided an alternative explanation of the acronym 'RSL.' Rest, Sleep and Live she reckoned.

Rest. Sleep. Live. Thanks I think I will :)