A Very Big If: The Second Anniversary

The Dutch language has a word that is not easily translated into other languages. The word is gezellig, and its closest counterpart in the English language is “cozy”. The Dutch might use the word to describe, for instance, the experience of drifting on a barge down an Amsterdam canal with close friends after a good dinner, watching the sunset.

If this Dutch word sounds familiar, it might be because I invoked the word a year ago, to commemorate the first year of this adventure (and subsequent blog). And I am summoning it again for the second anniversary, as I struggle to describe my gratitude and awe for the profound changes that have swept my life over the past two years.

Recently, I was sitting in the yoga studio in the fifteen minutes before class, reading a sociology textbook about social dilemmas for my new job while enjoying a chocolate mousse baklava and listening to Jamaican steel drum music from the street performer outside.

(If you’ve never heard of chocolate mousse baklava, you’re not alone; it was concocted by a yoga instructor who moonlights as a pastry chef, and often delivers his leftovers to the studio. Every so often, a brand new exotic dessert appears in the yoga studio’s lobby, free to all. This is the sort of thing that occurs frequently in my life.)

And I immediately thought to myself, how strange and unpredictable is this life. It wasn’t that long ago that I was trapped in a cubicle blighted by monitor glare and the smell of printer toner. And now here I was, reading a book I would never read, eating a dessert I’d never heard of, about to engage in an exercise I never thought I’d do.

The word gezellig may not have an English translation, but I have clearly deciphered its meaning over the course of this adventure. It has been two happy and wonderful years, and beyond belief, I still have no real idea when this adventure will end. There is the small twinkling of hope that the sabbatical is not a sabbatical, after all; that somehow, uncannily and unpredictably and indiscernibly: the sabbatical has become my life.

We’ll see.