A Gap Year
As we come up to the turn of the year, I find myself thinking about the new year and what it holds for us all. The year has a number of things in store that make it a potentially interesting year for us, but there is also an increasing sense I am getting that it may be one of those years that gets us from here to there without being a particularly notable year all unto itself. Hence my tendency to start thinking of 2023 as a potential gap year.
To begin with, when one refers to a gap year one is usually talking about a younger person taking a year off in between one level of educational experience and the next. The most common gap year occurs between high school and college. My kids are all out of college and my grandkids are still 7-10 years away from any potential gap periods. I have always been a man in a hurry for some reason, so the concept of a gap year never even entered my consideration. By the same token, I very much see the value in taking a break for some people either to specifically slow them down and force their thinking or to round them out by giving them something other than a book to stick their nose into for a period of time. Even though this interregnum is called a gap “year”, it is also clear that it can just be a meaningful break and does not have to last an entire calendar year. In fact, since academics are generally structured in semesters or even trimesters, that period of time to take off can be as short as sixteen weeks and still constitute taking a chunk of time off and postponing an ultimate career path choice.
Generally, I suspect most people are less inclined to characterize their time off as a necessary break to give them a rest and more about giving them an opportunity to pursue some passion or some interesting opportunity for travel or experience gathering. Our society tends to promote specialization and has done so for centuries. When man was not so plentiful on the earth, he needed to have a whole panoply of skills to get through the day. In Ancient Greece, Plato began thinking about specialization, but less in terms of economic efficiency and more about the inequalities that exist between humans and the need to have a division of labor to create a higher level of self-actualization. During the Roman Empire, St. Augustine spoke to the hierarchy of society and the acknowledgement that not everyone could or should do everything. Various and sundry great thinkers touched on the subject of the division of labor, but it was Adam Smith, the father of the “dismal science” of economics who, in the late Eighteenth Century, while expounding on the Wealth of Nations, delineated the importance of specialization to optimize economic productivity. The Industrial Age ran with that notion and here we are today with everyone thinking they have to become a left-eye specialist to maximize their value to society and thus to their own wealth creation capabilities. Generalists are accepted, but also implicitly denigrated as dilettantes more so than Renaissance Men. Gaps and Gap Years can be a means to improve the precision of specialization or avoid them altogether and broaden the beholder.
In the same way that people can consciously put themselves on pause, I think the world is also capable of taking a bit of a rest as well. There are decidedly years when less transpires of significance than in other years. With the pace of change clearly accelerating in line with the speed of processing and data retrieval speed needed to make better informed decisions, there is, naturally, a higher need to take a deep breath in between particularly active moments. The world has its own rhythms and those are mostly celestially-driven with days, months and years very much set by their relevant astrological cycles. Humans have organized themselves around those cycles and even added a few for their own convenience. While twelve months makes sense, its harder to explain 24 hours, sixty minutes or sixty seconds. The typical rationale is that the Egyptians worshipped the duodecimal system (base 12) rather than the decimal system (base 10). Some say it is about the lunar cycle, but a more enlightened (or at least more fun) view involves the digital counting conventions. Let’s remember that digits mean both computer data manipulation methodology (that would be all those 0’s and 1’s) and our more primordial counting system, meaning our hands and fingers…our other digits. You see, the decimal system is about using all ten fingers and the duodecimal system is about the three finger joints on each of the four fingers on each hand. Is that even believable? I know I’ve seen people counting on their fingers, but have you ever seen them counting on their finger joints? Not me.
Another perfect example is the week. We understand the daily rotation of the earth on its axis to give us our daily routine, and we can approximately synch ourselves monthly to the cycles that are physiological (for instance, menstruation) or tidal (the phases of the moon). But what is the week other than a convenient number of days that some Babylonian King once thought was a cool way to break up a month? Seven is a lucky number in numerology and in general and I guess it was lucky enough to get immortalized in perpetuity in the number of days of the week.
I am not a gap year kinda guy. There are times I wish I was, but I’m afraid I was always too driven to consider taking a year off, or anything more than some portion (and usually not all) of my allotted vacation time. It’s not that I wasn’t allowed to or might not have been allowed to, but I just never even tried. Worse than that, I never really wanted to try, even though I admire, for some strange reason, those who are able to free themselves to do that. I don’t understand whether it is a case of extreme self-confidence, figuring that there is always another opportunity or job when one returns after the gap, or just not giving a shit about consequences. Either way, its a quality I don’t possess and never will. If someone presents me with an opportunity, I find it impossible to not take it (eagerly) and the idea of saying no is anathema.
As I mentioned, 2023 seems like a gap year to me. The next presidential election is two years away and 2023 feels like nothing more than a warm-up year, when we are likely to spend our time watching Congress play with itself as part of the preamble to 2024 and the Administration work hard to seek justice in the form of taking Trump to task once and for all. On the personal front, I’m not sure we are doing much more in 2023 other than biding our time. We will spend much of the year waiting for son Tom’s wedding in September. Along the way, we will go to Egypt in search of our duodecimal roots, not to mention to Petra and Wadi Rum to reenact (at least for me) the days of Lawrence of Arabia and his cry of “Aqaba!” as we pretend to cross the Nefud Desert. And then in July we will go to Capital Reefs, the Utah version of the Nefud and gather with family for what may be a last collective Hurrah, at least for some time. We will get through the year and seek to fill the gap with whatever experiences the year has to offer. Sometimes gap years can be the best of times, so we will work towards that end and let the 2024 chips fall where they may.