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Spontaneity Beyond Sabbaticals

Dec. 21, 2004

Taking time to smell the coffee and the roses.

A couple of weeks ago I came across an article on sabbaticals, specifically on the number of managers and executives in American companies who are taking three months, or six months, or more away from their jobs. These are people in high pressure jobs, people for whom a 60- or 70-hour week would be a low-pressure break from the existing pace of their business lives. They are always on, seemingly dealing with a variety of business challenges during every one of their waking hours and finding that business subconsciously consumes a lot of their (relatively few) sleeping hours as well. For these men and women a sabbatical was a welcome time to pursue something completely different, to travel for pleasure, to read or write, to pursue an avocational interest such as marine biology. Having immensely enjoyed a sabbatical some 13 years ago, I can attest to its refreshing qualities. It takes an initial week or two, but you do find that you can step out of your job, you can release pressures that have built to an intensity that you can't otherwise appreciate. You find that there is, in fact, time to smell the coffee or the roses -- and to pursue interests that are not strictly job related. However, I wonder that if even the notion of sabbaticals formalizes something that should be more spontaneous. The article I was reading listed a dozen or so companies and their sabbatical policies, the number of years an executive had to put in before he or she was eligible for a refreshing course of action, the number of weeks or months the person could take. Please don't get me wrong. I applaud companies that have such policies, and I continue to appreciate in both job-related and non-job-related ways the opportunity my company gave me just over a decade ago. What I am getting at -- and what I am urging us to reexamine -- is the tendency we have to schedule things, almost everything. Even this essay suggests that: Taking the time to smell the coffee and the roses. Wouldn't it be better if we -- more spontaneously -- smelled the coffee or the roses? Or spent time with a spouse, or partner, or parent, or friend? Or went sailing, or took a hike, or just let our thoughts free associate? That we focused less on trying to schedule it than just doing it? It's difficult to do. It's terribly hard for anyone who is competitive, ambitious, used to structure, and whose working achievements are measured regularly against specific and demanding goals. How many times have you heard someone say, "I don't have time for that"? What I'm trying to suggest is that we do have time for that, that almost every day there is time to make that telephone call to someone just to say hello. To laugh over some particularly well-worded piece of satire. To take a walk around the block. To reflect on the emotions brought forth again upon re-hearing a piece of music. To simply tell someone else how much he or she means to us. I'm not going to try to give you a catalog of things of things to do -- or of things other people have done. That, too, would be to formalize something that, I believe, should be more spontaneous. You know yourself better than anyone else. You can sense better than anyone else what is meaningful to you. Only you can give expression to yourself. Whether that's smelling the coffee, or the roses, or something else is not important. What is important is whatever your role in business is, whatever your abilities and responsibilities are, whatever your ambitions and achievements are, you are foremost a human being. Give expression to your humanness. John S. McClenahen is an IW senior editor based in Washington, D.C.

About the Author

John McClenahen | Former Senior Editor, IndustryWeek

John S. McClenahen, is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, the executive management publication from which he retired in 2006. He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Cleveland, Ohio. In May 1967, he joined Penton Media Inc. in Cleveland and in September 1967 was transferred to Washington, DC, the base from which for nearly 40 years he wrote primarily about national and international economics and politics, and corporate social responsibility.

      McClenahen, a native of Ohio now residing in Maryland, is an award-winning writer and photographer. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently An Unexpected Poet (2013), and several books of photographs, including Black, White, and Shades of Grey (2014). He also is the author of a children’s book, Henry at His Beach (2014).

      His photograph “Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004” was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October 2011. Five of his photographs are in the collection of St. Lawrence University and displayed on campus in Canton, New York.

      John McClenahen’s essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context” was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Leavis of Rollins College. John McClenahen’s several journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal Award. He also is the author of the commemorative poem “Upon 50 Years,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Wolfson College Cambridge, and appearing in “The Wolfson Review.”

      John McClenahen received a B.A. (English with a minor in government) from St. Lawrence University, an M.A., (English) from Western Reserve University, and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to academic honor societies in English and government and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the University’s highest undergraduate honor. John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.

      John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founder and first editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. He has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.