Imagine a Year Off
Read about what a year of unpaid leave could look like and practise the second conditional.
Read the Text
Imagine that your boss offered you a whole year of unpaid leave. What would you do?
For many people, the first answer is travel. If I had a year off, I would spend three months in Vietnam, eating noodles for breakfast and watching the sun set over the rice fields. But travel alone fills only part of a year. If I were away from work for that long, I would quickly miss having a project of my own.
A friend of mine took eight months off last year. If you asked her about it now, she would say that the boredom of the second month was harder than any deadline. After three weeks of beaches, she started writing a children’s book. If the manuscript were ever published, she would call it her real prize from the trip.
A year off could also be a chance to learn something difficult. If I studied Italian every morning for nine months, I would be able to read newspapers in Rome by spring. If I practised the piano two hours a day, I would finally play the pieces I gave up on as a teenager.
Of course, money is the obvious problem. If rent stopped being expensive, more of us would consider this seriously. If companies offered sabbaticals more often, families would plan their lives around them.
In the end, the real question may be a different one. Our ordinary year already has empty spaces, and we rarely notice them. If we paid more attention to those gaps, we could maybe fix the problem without quitting at all.
Questions
What does the writer ask the reader to imagine?