I Checked My Phone on the Fifteenth Hole
Nothing needed me. I checked anyway.
I took a Tuesday afternoon off to play golf a few weeks ago. Not a client round. Not a scramble for somebody’s charity. Just eighteen holes on a Tuesday because I could, which is not a thing I do often.
On the fifteenth tee I took out my phone.
Nothing was wrong. Nobody had called. I wasn’t waiting on a decision or a number or a person. I read a Teams message. I put the phone back in my pocket, hit a fine drive, and forgot about it entirely.
Something else had to happen before I understood what I’d done.
Because that was the afternoon. That was the whole thing I say I want. Free Tuesday, good weather, no obligation. And somewhere between the fourteenth green and the fifteenth tee I went and checked whether anything needed me.
Not because anything did.
Because that’s what I do now.
A few weeks later I was talking to Doug, who had just retired at 62.
He spent his career as a senior scientist at a large pharmaceutical company. Ten or twelve projects running at any given moment. None of them individually crushing. He was not walking around saying I am under enormous stress. He would have told you, right up until the last day, that he was fine. He was fine.
Then it stopped. Email stopped. Meetings stopped. The projects stopped being his projects.
And he said the thing I haven’t been able to put down.
He hadn’t known how much he was carrying until somebody took it away.
Not burnout. Nothing that announced itself. Just the constant background hum of it: decisions waiting on him, problems parked in the corner of the room, people who might need something, work that could go sideways if nobody was watching. He never experienced it as weight. He experienced it as Tuesday.
He didn’t discover he’d been unhappy.
He discovered he’d been heavy.
He told me life just kept getting lighter. Like it was still happening. Like he was still finding pockets of it months later.
I’m 51. Four months ago I took a bigger job.
I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this essay is the one where the guy is miserable and the job is eating him and the reader gets to feel something. That’s not this.
I like the work. I like the people. I like being close enough to the decisions that I can actually move something. I wanted this job, I went and got it, and I told myself going in it would take a year before it felt normal. Four months is not a year.
But my word for this year was calm.
Earlier in the year I could feel it. Things were busy and I was still working out of some quiet center underneath the busy.
Lately there are cracks in that. Not from any one thing. From fifteen things sitting in fifteen different corners of my head. A strategic call here. A technology project there. A personnel question. A finance issue. Something that needs building. Something that needs fixing. Context switching stopped being a thing that happens to my day and became the shape of the day.
And here’s the part that got my attention.
I’m good at it.
I’m good at carrying this. I don’t come home wrecked. I don’t dread Monday. Every so often I can still take an afternoon off and play golf.
I’ve been treating that as evidence that the load is fine.
Doug would have said the same thing about his load, right up until the week somebody removed it.
Not feeling bad isn’t the same as nothing being there. That’s the piece I’d never thought about. You can get good enough at carrying something that you stop being able to feel it. Maybe the people who are best at carrying a large load are also the most likely to mistake carrying it well for not carrying much.
I played with Ray a few weeks ago, a guy I used to work with. He’s 63 and starting to think about when he stops.
I asked him what his wife wants retirement to look like.
He didn’t say a number. He didn’t say a house or a boat or a place in Florida.
He said she wants to be sitting somewhere on a Wednesday afternoon and be able to say, “want to go to Chicago tomorrow?”
And go.
Chicago. Not Lake Como. Nothing about that sentence is aspirational. She isn’t describing a reward.
She’s describing a Wednesday where nothing urgent owns tomorrow.
So what do I actually do with this?
Not quit. I’m not writing the essay where the guy walks away, and I’d be suspicious of that essay anyway, four months into a job he wanted.
Probably not fewer projects either. Some of the fifteen are the reason the job is interesting.
But I think I’ve been getting the afternoon off wrong.
I’ve been treating them as recovery. Earn the load, take the release valve, go back to it Wednesday. Which is why I checked my phone on the fifteenth. If the afternoon is a reward for carrying the weight, you never actually set the weight down. You just carry it somewhere nicer.
Maybe the point of the afternoon isn’t rest.
Maybe it’s practice.
Doug had his lifted off all at once, and it took him months to realize how heavy it had been. I’d rather stay in practice.
Take the Tuesday. Leave the phone in the bag. Go to dinner without one eye somewhere else. Go somewhere for no reason other than that you can go.
Not because you earned it.
I don’t know how to do that well yet.
But next time I get to the fifteenth tee on a Tuesday afternoon, I know where my phone is staying.