Try this at dinner sometime.
Say, lightly, that you’ve been thinking you might stop for a while.
Then watch the pause.
Watch somebody’s fork hold still for half a second while they work out whether you’re all right.
You wouldn’t say it twice.
I’ve been thinking about that since Saturday, when a friend rang to tell me his son had packed in the job and gone to South America.
Twenty-four. Six months on a sales desk, headset on, hating it from about the first week. And for most of those six months my friend had been making the case for staying. Give it a year. Nobody wants to hire a person who leaves.
Good advice, that. I’d probably have given it myself.
He told me in about nine words, then moved on to something else.
Last year his wife left too.
Fifty-seven, twenty-odd years running operations for a logistics firm, home late most nights and later than that in the autumn. She came in on a Thursday and said she’d taken early retirement.
Announced, not discussed.
He knows I’m writing this, by the way. Names changed, details moved around — but he read it and said go on.
Two people out of the same house, three decades apart. And both times there was a perfectly respectable word waiting for them when they got there.
Travelling.
Early retirement.
Between those two words there are about thirty-three years in which the explanation gets considerably harder.
Which is why the fork holds still.
There is no easy way to announce that you would like to put down a life a great many people would be glad to have.
There’s barely a sentence for it.
So you don’t say it, and the not-saying gets filed as good sense — which it is.
Here is the part I keep returning to.
The advice he gave his son was sound, and it had something in it that people miss.
It had a date.
Give it a year.
That isn’t a sentence handed down forever. It’s a term, with an end, after which the thing gets looked at again.
My friend has a folder.
He’s had it about two years.
A business, half-designed — the model, the costings, two possible names. He knows what’s in that folder better than he knows most things.
Ask him when he’s going and he says not yet.
There’s his mother. There’s his brother’s situation. There are obligations, and they aren’t invented — I know the family, and they’re real, and they will still be real on Friday.
But the rule he handed his son runs out.
The one he runs on himself doesn’t.
It simply moves.
That difference is not a small one.
A rule with a term in it can be held up against something. You can find out in a year whether it was right.
A rule without one never has to answer for itself.
It doesn’t argue.
It doesn’t fail.
It just goes on quietly being the reason.
Which is why, in his case, the useful question isn’t what do you want?
He knows what he wants. That was never the shortage.
The question is:
Who set the not yet, and when does it lift?
Nobody has asked.
There is nothing to be done with the answer this week.
It’s simply a thing to look at, and it has been sitting in plain sight for two years.
If you’re waiting for something to settle — has anyone ever told you when it does?
Rosaleen
P.S. May I ask you a small favour?
If you’ve ever sat with that decision — the job, the business, the thing you built, and whether to stay in it or stop — I’d like your eyes on something.
It’s a short set of questions written for exactly that position.
I hope it helps you notice something useful — even if that’s simply confirming something you already knew, or bringing something back to mind that had gone rather quiet.
Nothing is decided by taking it.
What I’d particularly like to know is whether I’ve asked the right questions.
It’s called Carry On Or Stop? — click here