Photo: Jeremy Klaszus

The replenishing power of pause

There’s life on the other side of burnout.

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A couple years ago, during a period of burnout, I hit pause on The Sprawl for four months.

At the time I was ready to shut it down entirely but was talked by people I trust into taking a summer sabbatical instead. In those days I often experienced running an independent news outlet as a gruelling existential weight.

These days I mostly don’t experience it that way and am grateful for that. Partly it's because I took that break.

Two years on, it’s interesting to reflect back on that experience and what it planted—and what’s come to fruition since.

I’ve been thinking about it because earlier this month I was in Victoria, B.C., with my wife for a few days and deleted social media and email off my phone, which put me somewhat back in “sabbatical mode” during our vacation.

One of my favourite places in Victoria—one of my favourite places anywhere!—is the inner harbour, and specifically the benches there. They are set back from where people stroll by the water. Sitting on those benches, which are tucked out of the way behind some trees, one can quietly watch the world drift by.

A place for reflection. Photo: Jeremy Klaszus

I remember, two years ago on my sabbatical, sitting in that same spot and devouring Philosopher of the Heart, Clare Carlisle’s superb biography of Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard, which I’d picked up from Munro’s Books up the street. (Said Kierkegaard: “The lowest depth to which people can sink before God is defined by the word ‘Journalist.’” But I digress.)

It’s amazing how a place can bring you back so powerfully to a specific book you read at a certain time in your life. I read a ton during my sabbatical. Since I wasn’t publishing or posting online to social media, there was little to check, and as a result my attention was far less fragmented than it is usually. I could dig in. It was rejuvenating.

On this most recent visit, early one morning, I walked from downtown up into Esquimalt, where I lived briefly after high school, and found a beat-up old Robertson Davies paperback, The Manticore, in a Little Free Library.

I consider myself a slow reader but once again, with all the attention-grabbing apps off my phone, I found I could focus like I can’t usually, and read it in a couple days.

This was in between doing Stampede events with The Sprawl’s pop-up press, a project that came directly out of my 2023 sabbatical. (This is a question I get often when I’m out with the press: So how did this come about!? Well, this is part of the answer.)

One of the prints we had on the pop-up press during the Calgary Stampede. Photo: Jeremy Klaszus

Hitting pause that summer gave me room to follow new and creative lines of curiosity. I got interested in the history of publishing and in particular letterpress printing, and wondered how an old technology like that might fit into a modern-day local news operation. Soon I got obsessed with the idea of putting a printing press on a bicycle—fanciful, perhaps, but not impossible!

My inspiration was Nick Hand, a printing cyclist in Bristol, England, who has an 8 x 5 Adana Press mounted onto a custom bicycle which he calls The Printing Bike. He would ride across the British countryside, printing postcards along the way that were relevant to each stop.

More recently he did a tour of public libraries in Britain, printing different bookmarks at each library. Brilliant!

Nick Hand and his printing bike. Photo: Jonathan Cherry (theletterpresscollective.org)

Reading about Hand’s bike adventures lit up my imagination. I found an old tabletop press for sale on Facebook Marketplace, connected with some local letterpress printers to learn the basics of printing and the rest is history.

Two years later, I can see a clear line from that much-needed summer pause to the season I’m in today where I have creative energy and focus again. Carving out space for meandering, I've learned, is crucial. This is how one discovers unexpected paths.

I see it time and time again, whether it’s on a big life scale or a smaller scale, like when I’m working on a specific story. One inevitably gets stuck—and hitting pause, setting aside the work and going on a walk, even a little jaunt, can set one loose again.



I was pleased to see the CBC follow up this week on The Sprawl's latest Green Line story—particularly our question to Premier Danielle Smith about her husband attending a confidential government meeting on a Calgary-Banff rail line (a story originally broken by Charles Rusnell at The Tyee). Independent journalism for the win!

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Jeremy Klaszus is founder and editor of The Sprawl.

Support independent Calgary journalism!

Sign Me Up!

The Sprawl connects Calgarians with their city through in-depth, curiosity-driven journalism. If you value independent local news, support our work so we can keep digging into municipal issues in the run-up to the 2025 civic election—and beyond!