IS THIS IT?
The provisional life, and what it quietly costs.
It was a Saturday morning, sometime in the second year of the pandemic. I was at my desk before eight, covering two roles, with a backlog that never quite cleared regardless of how many hours I gave it. That pattern had been running for most of the year. Twelve-hour days, most Saturdays, the inbox always winning.
At some point during that stretch, not dramatically, a question arrived. Is this it?
Not asked in anger. More like a quiet audit. Three words, but with considerable weight behind them. And I didn’t have a good answer.
What followed was a period of honest self-reflection that eventually led me to make a significant pivot: towards a life reordered around what I now know matters most, a shift to executive coaching, a relocation to Thailand, and a different relationship with how I spend my time. That process took several years of deliberate effort. But it started with three words on a Saturday morning.
I’ve been thinking about what my life before that question actually looked like. Not a failing life by any visible measure. Successful, by the metrics that tend to matter in corporate environments. But personal care, my health, time with the people I valued, the things that made me feel like myself, all of it was contingent. Fitted in around the edges, if the edges existed.
Lunch with a friend would be scheduled and rescheduled until it quietly fell away. A visit to family would be pushed out to a future holiday window. A health check would be noted and deferred. The reading, the walking, the slower parts of life, all held in a queue marked when things ease off.
And the holidays were carrying more psychological weight than any holiday should. There was always a next thing on the horizon to provide the motivation to keep going: only eight more weeks until the trip, six weeks, three. The present moment perpetually mortgaged against a future reward.
The cost of this wasn’t only personal. The people around me, my partner, my family, my friends, deserved more of me than they were getting. I was physically present often enough, but mentally elsewhere. The running list of things needing dealt with followed me to the dinner table, to weekends, to holidays. I didn’t recognise this as a form of absence at the time. I do now.
What I’ve also come to understand is that I was locating happiness entirely outside myself. In the next trip, the next milestone, the next role. Happiness was something that would arrive, delivered by circumstances and events. The idea that I might be the source of it, that it might be available now rather than later, simply hadn’t landed.
Making the pivot didn’t resolve all of this cleanly. The conditioned self, shaped by education, by decades of corporate culture, by a deeply absorbed story about how a life should be sequenced, didn’t step aside when I made the decision. It still shows up. It runs its familiar script: concerns about security, about relevance, about whether this was a reasonable thing to do. I’ve learned to hear that voice without being governed by it. And alongside it, something steadier has grown. A deep knowing, felt as much in the body as in the mind, that this was the right move at the right time. That happiness doesn’t need to be deferred until the conditions are right. That I am responsible for it, and that it is available here, now.
The equanimity that comes from that realisation is not detachment. It’s a more honest, more grounded engagement with life as it actually is.
That experience has given me a particular attentiveness to the same pattern in the leaders I work with. It shows up in the meeting room: the leader who is physically present but mentally elsewhere, already on the next problem, the next conversation, the next item on a list that never shortens. Their colleagues notice, even when they don’t say so. And underneath it, often, the same quiet architecture: a life where the present is perpetually mortgaged against a future reward.
I wonder whether any of this resembles your life. Not the specifics, perhaps, but the shape of it. The sense that real life is always slightly ahead of where you are, waiting for the right moment to begin. The present treated as preparation rather than the thing itself.
If it does, it might be worth sitting with the question I couldn’t answer on that Saturday morning. Not with urgency, just with honesty.
I work with senior leaders navigating significant moments, whether that’s a new role, a significant career moment, or a growing sense that how they’re living and how they’re leading have quietly drifted apart. If that resonates, I’d love to hear from you.
Photo by Hasan Almasi on Unsplash