I have stopped, deliberately, and I want to write about it while I am still in it, before I do the thing everyone does and rewrite a rest into a plan afterward.
Fifteen years. From a concrete crew to a racetrack to the Grey Nuns to a classroom to the City of Edmonton to a company on another continent. I have not really paused since I was twenty-two, and somewhere in the last year I noticed I had started working the way you drive a road you know too well: competently, and without seeing anything.
So I stopped. Nothing lined up. Just a winter, then a spring, and a decision to sit inside my own life for a while and find out what I think when nobody is waiting for a file.
It has been harder than I expected. A working life hands you an identity you never have to build. Take the projects away and the question of who you are comes back on its own, and it does not accept a job title for an answer.
What I have found is that I miss the craft and not the churn. I miss solving something. I do not miss the low, constant hum of finding the next client and keeping everyone happy, the change and the change and the change. Learning that difference was worth the winter.
I am heading into a second decade of this work, and I would rather enter it on purpose than on momentum. That is the whole reason for the pause. If it sounds like a luxury, I would only say that never stopping costs more.