Tracey Falk

Design Director Tracey Falk has been a skilled and grounding presence in Domain7’s life since 1998. Recently, she has pushed her design practice into new territory—bringing her deep experience to mentoring our team, and stepping into facilitation and organizational transformation with partners.

In 2019 Tracey took a thoughtful step away from the workplace for five intentional months of sabbatical. What she explored in that time became only more relevant when the pandemic hit a couple brief months later. I sat down with her in 2020 to discuss her experience.

Could you say a little bit about what animates and engages you as a person?

Observation animates and engages me. I am naturally drawn to things with an observing capacity to them—photography, and coastal wanderings. There’s an element of meditation, time and space to imagine. I can’t imagine a life where I don’t have time and space to just lollygag in my brain.

Do you have any observations on how your life and work talk to each other?

This is an evolution. I don’t think that any answer I say right now will be permanent. Work is a relationship, with all the mess and beauty that relationships bring with them.

And sometimes work just is: it isn’t “other” to me—to my life and myself as a human being. It’s hard to pull it apart and separate it in many respects. I mean, this is in the good moments. We all have those moments where it’s too much and it’s tapping into negative emotions. But work isn’t “other” to our lives.

What prompted your sabbatical?

A number of reasons really, but in large part it was a response to a prolonged, intense period of creative output at work combined with…I’ve just been at a place for a long time. I needed to take something back for myself that had been continually put into this very specific output. I needed to go back to that observation space, where my creativity is allowed to flourish and live in a different way.

How to move that pendulum was something I could no longer figure out in the day-to-day. It needed and required a step away.

I also can’t ignore that when I took the sabbatical I was 47. There are just different questions you start asking yourself when you hit middle life, questions that you can no longer shove aside. So then it becomes—how do you bring more presence into your life and what do you need in order to do that in a compressed amount of time? It’s an evolution and growth as a person.

How many months did you take and where did you plan to go?

I chose five months because—honestly, I could afford five months. I crunched the numbers.

I’m grateful that there was a lot of understanding in the organization, and that they held the space for me. I have an incredibly talented co-leader of our team, so I didn’t have to worry about stepping away. I’m in a unique position, which I deeply appreciate.

The first thing I booked was a ten-day artist residency in Scotland—and because that was going to be a time of solitude and creativity, I knew I needed a movement piece. So I found a hiking tour to do before the residency. I also booked a week at a retreat with a teacher I respect, Richard Rohr, in New Mexico—a retreat addressing the topic of spirit and earth.

So it was just a beautiful contrast. And maybe because of the drama of their landscapes, there’s a lot of earthbound spirituality in both Scotland and New Mexico.

Let’s talk about highlights—favourite parts of this experience.

I think of a moment on the first day of the artist residency in Scotland; I sat down with my writing, and I had this moment of realization that nobody’s going to be contacting me. There are zero asks on my time today. There’s nothing, there’s just me and a book and the pond in front of me. The frog in the pond, this little tiny space, that’s it.

The New Mexico starry nights will forever remain imprinted in my mind. Building the fire in a cabin—your task for most of seven hours, being to stoke a fire—was a favourite moment.

Would you say there were different moods that passed through?

Yeah…the expansiveness of time can feel beautiful and awful at the same time, right? You could critique the way you filled your time: “Well now I must fill my time with something more productive than this nothing I filled it with yesterday.” It becomes this tension you’re wrestling with, allowing “nothing” to be okay. Who am I, if I’m not contributing something?

For a while I was an island to myself.

Just me, as a person, outside of every other thing that defines us. There’s a deep okay-ness with that, which has settled in for me over time.

Was there anything else unexpected on this journey?

I had a chronic knee injury flare-up, which made the hiking challenging. There was a moment on a really rainy day where we had walked deep into a glen and the group was going to continue on a steep hill, which the hiking guide didn’t think I should attempt to tackle.

The group was gone for two hours while I stayed put, surrounded by nothing but big green hills and a few distant sheep. No human that I could see within sight. But also no predatory animals (like we have in BC, Canada) to keep me on any sense of alert. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that kind of stillness in nature—covered in mud, drenched by rain, physically spent, and yet in that moment just deeply present and connected to everything around me.

Another thing that showed up—I met a lot of new people in those two months who were absolutely significant to the whole experience. I think when you’re younger, you have this desire to hold onto those kind of “summer camp” people, in part to hold onto the moments themselves. But at this stage in life, there was something meaningful in just being present with people where we were, of a sense of real connection that ultimately belonged to the land and the moments we shared and didn’t necessarily need continuation.

You mentioned New Mexico skies: why is that such a sharp memory for you?

I love the sense of mystery attached to space or sky. I love those moments when the Milky Way is front-and-center, in front of your face. You can’t not think about it down there in New Mexico. I know people who don’t want to think about the vastness of space because it makes them feel nervous or they feel a sense of unease. I just feel this great sense of comfort in the mystery of it.

Knowing that nobody really knows. There’s big questions nobody has answers to. And it both makes you feel small and huge at the same time.

What was it like returning to work?

It was both challenging and easy. It was challenging to lose that expanse of time: getting back in your schedule, and expectations, and deadlines, and calendars.

On the good side of it—work is a family. You miss your family. It was nice to return to people who know you.

Coming back, I had a sense of hope and potential around the possibility of changing some of the small things and engaging some other things in different way.

But then the pandemic hit a month after I returned—everybody paused any long-term thinking.

What was your experience of quarantine after sabbatical solitude?

Pandemic solitude is different than sabbatical solitude. The sabbatical was this period of solitude that was very intentional and purposeful—it had a lot of hope and energy to it.

With the pandemic, the world’s energy was different: all around you was a sense of worry and stress. This was solitude filled with uncertainty. And normal daily life patterns had to suddenly shift—no outside force was dictating a change in normal routines during my sabbatical. Add into that, I couldn’t see people even if I wanted to.

I think in the beginning of the pandemic there was this push to almost use it as a type of sabbatical. “Look at all this time you have now! Write a book! Learn a skill!”

That is actually probably the experience of some people. I think in the beginning it relieved pressure for some people who had crazy schedules—there was a calming for many people. However, there can be unhealthiness in needing to transfer your sense of achievement from a busy external life into that personal, at-home space.

In some sense the sabbatical did prepare me for the solitude. I know what it is like to be alone with my own company for long periods of time.

The other difference with the pandemic was that it was collective, I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced a collective experience like that—of revamping your life and uncertainty. When does the world get thrown into chaos like that, all at the same time? In the very beginning of the pandemic there was this sense of a shared experience, which was fascinating.

You’ve talked a bit about what you’re carrying forward from this season: this ultimate okay-ness. It feels like there’s an acceptance of reality there. Anything else that you want to highlight?

I think a better honouring of myself as a creative, and a cultivation of that daily, came out of this for me. I can’t just channel that into one area—by that I mean work—and let it overwhelm that part of me any more.

And at work—I think of something Yuval Noah Harari wrote in his book Sapiens, that “any human cooperation…is rooted in myths that exist in people’s collective imagination.” He points out that a myth is actually helpful—something a group of people agree to rally behind. In some sense, I think there’s a reconnection to that.

Having been here for 20-plus years—the team changes all the time. So you can’t really rally around specific people, which sucks, because you want to. But the truth is, it’s this collective that I rally around.

Another realization is that I need to address myself faster. You can’t just keep ignoring things until it gets to the point where it requires something more dramatic. So I think going forward, more deeply observing my well-being, as well as the world around me.

What would you tell somebody who recognizes being at that point, and wants to take a sabbatical?

I understand that this can be a challenging decision for people, a decision that has a lot of mitigating factors. And I feel so grateful I took this time before the pandemic hit. The world is different now, and it will be different for a while.

And in that rest, try to add some active engagement. It needs to introduce something new. I’m not going to tell you what that is. But there has to be something different than your normal life. And that needs to be challenging—it needs to scare you a little bit.

I think at the same time, you have to release expectations from it. The advice that other artists gave me on the first day of the residency was to take away the expectation of producing anything. You can say, “I want this to be my goal,” and work towards a goal. But you might be disappointed, and how do you mitigate that? How do you enter with an awareness that it’s not achieving the goal, it’s working towards it and a process that’s important here?

I took that flavour into the whole sabbatical. You can’t start with, “My life’s going to change and it’s all going to be different and I’ll be a different person.” I think change will come from a sabbatical, but I don’t think you will know when that change will appear in your life. I’m starting to see now even, some of the outworkings of this time.

Enjoy more of Tracey’s evocative and stunning travel photography from her sabbatical with this curated album.