Twenty-five years in and I still can't switch off

I decided to take a holiday.

Or more exactly, a few weeks off.

Because for me, real holidays aren't this.

They're the ones where you leave almost without warning,

And where you find yourself lying on the beach in the sun, in the middle of nowhere, eyes closed, your back stuck to the irregular shapes of the sand, and your mind wandering freely.

Even for someone like me who comes from and lives on an island, this remains the ultimate holiday cliché.

But here, none of that.

I stayed home to spend time with my son and my wife. Enjoying simple pleasures like family card games - I always lose - going to the cinema for a good dose of popcorn - and not for the kids' movie - or playing football in the living room.

It's great. I love it.

But the bad side of all this is that you don't really cut off.

If you tend to invest yourself in your work, it tends to follow you home.

I'm not working. I could say I have nothing to do.

But at the beginning of my time off, part of my mind is still back there, turning over things I haven't completely finished.

Then it fades after a few days. I've learned to do it. To let go. I eventually conclude that it will wait until I'm back.

Maybe you get it on a Sunday evening, when you catch yourself replaying a conversation from work that nobody else has thought about since.

Twenty-five years will do that to you..

When you've done something that long it stops being a place you go to. It takes up room in your head, and being away doesn't seem to change that much.

For years I thought it was a problem I had to fix. Switch off properly. Be present. All of that.

I don't think that anymore.

Being able to hold something in your head even when you're supposed to be away from it, to keep caring about it when nobody's checking, isn't a flaw. You built that. It took you decades, and most people half our age haven't got it yet.

So the question was never how to switch it off.

It's what it's attached to.

That's the part that got me. All those years of judgment and experience, invested in a job I really care about, and all of it compounds into somebody else's organization. Not mine.

And I'm 55. I can count the working years I've got left now. Not in a grim way. It's just a number I can actually count, which wasn't true at 40.

I'd rather not all of them belonged to someone else.

That's most of the reason I write.

The same effort, the same investment, and the same awareness of a job well done, but pointed elsewhere.

These thirty years aren't baggage I've got to leave behind to start something of my own. It's the material.

Yours are too.

If any of that sounds familiar, I wouldn't rush to fix it.

It might be the most useful thing you've got.

Have a look at what it's wired to.

Speak soon,