After sixteen years I was up for a year off with pay 2011-2012. A sabbatical! It’s fair to say this probably won’t happen again, and for all four of us the timing seemed to be the best it was going to be, so the option of staying put in New Hampshire for the year bounced back and forth between us for all of four or five minutes. But where to go? Well, besides my wife and me there were our kids, nine and four. What would they do for schooling? How would they adjust? What would they do? We thought briefly of staying in country, of moving to Colorado or California. Communication would be no problem, academics could be worked out, adjustment overall would be relatively easy. We’d heard that in some ways it wouldn’t matter where we went, that the beauty of relocating for the year without the typical work obligations in itself would be a great gift. Moving away from old routines and rhythms to learn more about one another and ourselves, find new routines, live new adventures as a family, gain perspective—all of these ideas seemed to make sense.
What would be lacking, however, was the adventure element. For us this meant a different country, a different culture, a different language. I guess we were looking to up the ante and challenge ourselves more than California or Colorado (nothing against these fine states, and yes, I’m sure we could still challenge ourselves in some ways there, but we decided we wanted to go abroad). Not too much more challenge, mind you—China came to mind briefly, for example, but one of the goals of this year being renewal--some relaxation here and there amongst the trials and tribulations--such a different culture with such a difficult language just did not seem within our reach given “just” twelve months to adjust. As visitors for a few weeks, sure, no problem, give us exotic, take me completely out of my comfort zone, but as semi-residents? We just couldn’t wrap our minds around it.
So we wanted a challenge, but we didn’t want it to be too exhausting. We wanted our kids to be appreciated and to have a reasonable chance of making friends in our new location, but we wanted them to learn about another perspective on life and on the world via a different language and culture, ones that would be within their grasp and ours. Given all of this, we rejected taking a world map, a blindfold and a dart and throwing our future to chance. We decided on Italy.
