Abstract
This chapter offers a creative inquiry into the author’s embodied experiences with living and learning as an academic. Playfully mobilizing the rich concepts of hap and hope, Black uses journal entries, photographs, and embodied, rhythmic, poetic ‘hap’ writing to create spaces for herself and for her readers to pause, reflect, think, feel, and be differently in the world. Through the form and style of her life writing in this chapter, she pushes against the weight of academic cultures to embrace an orientation to embodied reflection and theorizing that unsettles and transcends traditional academic writing and norms. For Black, academia is too often a relentless, hungry institution that extracts rather than nourishes. At mid-life, she uses the chapter to imagine otherwise, to take meaningful time, and to listen to her body as it leads her into new ontological possibilities for her future academic life. The body emerges as a vital site of wisdom and teaching that with time and care can protect and guide each of us against tyrannical work demands and the constant changes that characterize contemporary neoliberal institutions. Black invites readers to consider how to embrace slow rhythms of productivity and embodied engagement to seek holism in their own lives.