recently - jan '26 ✺
I started the year five seconds late at my friend's place then staggered home through the fresh fog shrouding North Burnaby. The rest of the day was spent responding to seasonal messages, sipping hangover tea, and learning the chords to a song on my keyboard for a funny bit on my IG stories.[1]
Kante's one of my favourites for unobvious reasons. On the surface, it's your standard afrobeats song with a sick tune, but tucked between lyrics of moving legs and waists in a barely-lit room with sticky floors, loud bass, and poor ventilation, is a random line that sums up trending terminally-online discourse:
disconnect the internet cause I'm feeling intellectual 🎶
Davido and Fave did what the 1073 substackers could never!
January marked month 3 of my sabbatical, and it started with the same counter-cycling routine: reading, flâneuring, and writing. That last one's been keeping me sane!
My first post was a yearly review of 2025. It was supposed to be a cute overview but ended up covering all the stuff that led to me being on a sabbatical in the first place.
I enjoyed visiting my usual third spaces to write, and being open enough to get distracted by the things around me: like a green balloon causing chaos on the Lougheed Highway while I typed at the Brentwood Starbucks, or a well-camouflaged hummingbird on my neighbour's balcony.
I got my theme for 2026 while looking up at the clouds waiting for a bus. Glad the theme arrived just after I finished the yearly review. [2]
After publishing the review, I felt a slight pit in my stomach. Now that I was done with the project, I no longer had anything to distract me from the elephant in my room…that the 3-month leave of absence was ending and I'd have to get back to work, to quit my job.
In the days before heading back, I lived on the couch, cycling through infinite feeds.[3] It wasn't all scrolling though, I did get to finally making an index page for my website…something something productive procrastination.
The distractions didn't last long. Eventually, I realised that most of the tension was self-imposed (a mix of anxiety and impatience). I knew I was going to quit, but did it have to be exactly on the day I returned?
I've learned over time that this is my temperament. In certain doses, it shows up as—my friends say—an "extraordinary ability to get things done/follow through" (I call it 'Berserker mode', much cooler). In uneven doses, it shows up as self-forgetting, or worse, self-punishing.
I found better mythos for this in my Ghanaian roots. My mother once told me about our Akan clan, Oyoko, whose totem is the falcon. The clan's slogan:
Akorɔma a ɔfa adeɛ a ɔfa no bumpoints at how the raptors hunt: going for things wholly and quickly after extended periods of surveying.
I wrote it down back then but mostly chalked it up to interesting lore I could use in a fantasy story later. But over the years, I'm struck by how much it describes my personality at work. This sabbatical might literally be that surveying, waiting until I go full-force again towards something!
That broke the spell. Why put all this pressure on myself? Why not just go back to work, and see what the vibe is? I took my foot off the gas.
The first day back was fun actually. I announced my return with a meme like a returning cast member in a 90s sitcom. People laughed, and I loved seeing the familiar faces (it'd been 3 months!). Huh, maybe I don't have to quit so soon?
That quickly guttered out once I got back to the actual work. Interesting as it was, my elephant wouldn't budge. The pit in my stomach returned, and the dissonance reminded me of the bigger mission.
The next morning I puttered around my apartment, then around the block for 30 mins, before texting my manager that it was time for me to resign. So it is funny that I did quit a few days into returning, but this was not from that anxious graspy place but a calmer knowing.
The last few calls with my manager were so bittersweet. It felt like it was out of a fantasy script where an old sage gives advice to the young lad before they part ways. I really will miss my manager and my team.
The weather that week was surprisingly great. A friend was in desperate need of sun after a hard work shift, so we went out for a walk around Stanley Park. Man! It's been ages since I walked that part of the seawall.
We met at Coal Harbour and took one of the trails to Beaver Lake. The view was nice: chill air, a lot of beige, and many many ducks squawking and splashing down the lake. I pulled two aside to ask if they'd seen any beavers around:
My friend and I went to sit on a nearby bench, taking really deep breaths and silently looking around.
Soon, we saw an old man with a bulging backpack walk up from one of the side trails. He took a few steps and just dropped his jaw for like a minute, taking the views in, before walking past us. We exchanged glances and cheeky smiles. Second-hand awe.
That seemed to be a motif on this Thursday afternoon: elderly men doing their own thing. A guy who—I kid you not—looked just like Albert Einstein walking by the seawall around English Bay. Another ran past us in multi-coloured lycra, clearly in zone 2. Another was on an e-bike playing songs I did not recognise but felt would make my father smile in nostalgia.
Last was another old man who went for a polar dip at Sunset Beach. It took a minute of hesitating before he finally walked in, a jolly good show judging by the other whispering onlookers.
This motif of people living arrhythmic lives touched me. The next day was officially my last day at Microsoft.
I had one more call with the manager over logistics and packed up my equipment to send to the office. I watched that "What's up danger" scene from Into the Spiderverse to muster up the vim.
Aside: "What's up danger"
I added that scene to my sacred texts folder. "When will I know I'm spiderman?" "You won't, it's a leap of faith". Cut to the actual leap of faith scene. Someone pointed out that when he leaps off the building, the glass where his hands were breaks off too. He was holding on so hard, but still did it scared. So good!
It so happened that a good chunk of my office friends were around that Friday. We laughed and caught up, it'd been a while since I'd visited. Cheering at a newly minted parent, kudos to one whose farming business was picking up, followed by a lot of wooah's when I revealed to them that I was leaving. One asked "Are you scared?" Of course I was!
I turned my badge in, heading for the elevator with two of them: Deji and his friend, Yaw. Inside, they patted my shoulders and shared some encouragement knowing this wasn't an easy decision to see through. I don't remember exactly what they shared, it felt like I was shedding an identity. In the last 4 seconds of the elevator I rolled my eyes up and pretended to be crossing the threshold from my innie.
We walked out the office building laughing. The sun was setting, and it was official. I had quit my job, and left Microsoft. The two asked what I had planned the rest of that evening. I told them I was walking home. They bid adieu and were about to turn the other way when it hit them. "Wait…walk!?"
Yup! That's right. The first expedition for 2026 is me quite literally walking away from Microsoft, from my office in Downtown, Vancouver all the way to Brentwood, Burnaby. Felt like a great bookend for this chapter.
I walked out of the peninsula through the Cambie bridge, making sure to get one last look before heading on. Through Mount Pleasant and other neighbourhoods, across many unknown residential streets in East Van (my sidequest to walk all the roads in the city continues, naturally)
At one point, I walked past the train tracks leading out of Commercial, and cruised down Broadway.
The sun was completely out and the sky was clear that night. By this point, I'd looped many times through the first song in Sun-El Musician's afrohouse set.
The song's chorus is about someone feeling lost and asking for divine guidance. Felt that deeply, and cried for a kilometre or so, alchemising all the feelings into steps. Encouragement that this very big and scary move was going somewhere good, someplace that felt like home.
I spent the last week of January denying that I was falling sick, then after a hundred or so sneezes and coughs, accepted that I had caught the winter flu.
You'd think it was from walking in 2-degree weather for two hours, but I'm certain it's from the birthday parties that weekend.
Regardless, I'm not complaining. It's been a very busy month, so I appreciate the forced rest, a chance to slow into my first read of the year, and spicy chicken ramen. Hopefully, I recover soon. I'd like to spend February as an intellectual. Time to disconnect the internet…