This evening is the end of my nine day sabbatical, and I look back on it with fondness, like the end of a movie where the person flashes back to all the good times in their life in a soft focus. I did nothing, and it was everything I thought it could be.

Tomorrow I’ll return to work and wade through the emails, voice mails, sticky notes, white board scribblings, and other communicative relics folks felt so inclined to leave for me in my absence. I’ll do my best to make sense of what happened while I was gone, piecing fragments of communiques together in a near-arbitrary order (since chronological doesn’t ever quite do it), and people will ask why I’m not done with whatever it was I was working on, what my status is.

Sigh.

I will also face the choice of allowing myself to be distracted by the innumerable requests for a recount of my adventures in San Andreas or blocking my cubicle door, at which point I will only get half as many requests, these from the people who think the “I’m Busy” indicators outside my cube really don’t apply to them (and those people would be incorrect). I will attempt to point them to my web site, where there is bound to be more richness and detail about my travels than I am able to impart in the abbreviated time allotted, but they will all always rather hear it directly from me, since I obviously will have copious amounts of time to spare on such things my first couple of days back.

In the end, my vacation was good, and I am glad I took it. However, when I return to work, bright and early tomorrow morning, I will probably close my eyes, shake my head, and wonder if it was really worth it, to take a small amount of relaxation time in the midst of one of my neverending projects, just so I can be that much further behind.

That said, I suppose it can be argued that if one is constantly sprinting, when “crunch time” really comes and additional speed is required, there will be no energy left to go that extra mile.

I think the answer is that maybe, just maybe, life itself needs to slow down - just a little - so it isn’t always required that one sprints; perhaps slow and steady really does win the race. Sadly, the business world - the high-tech business world - rests for no one, and doesn’t really afford its minions the rest, either. One must take one one can get, and enjoy it while it lasts, since the world waits for no one.

Onward, ever forward, I go.