I am days away from carefully dismantling the routines and patterns that I have come to know all too well.

Six months without a regular paycheck will be manageable—I have saved, I have planned—but work is more than a source of monetary income. Work has long functioned as evidence I matter and I belong. Achievement made my life orderly; productivity answered questions before they could be asked.

Over the next 6 months I will need to answer what fills the space when effort is no longer measured and when identity is not reinforced by output. I will define my purpose without it being defined by a 40 hr/ week routine.

What Starbucks calls a career coffee break is a sanctioned pause, a sanctioned exhale, the kind of permission we rarely grant ourselves.

I will take it and follow the map south and then farther south, into the arid desert of Santa Fe, before heading up north and west to the clean granite of Bishop, the red-walled cathedrals of Red Rocks and vast magic of Joshua Tree. I will head north again to Alta’s cold blue mornings, farther still to Squamish where the air thickens lush rain and dense forest.

I will ski until my legs remember something my mind has forgotten, boulder until the rock gives me back a name I misplaced years ago.

It will be, or so I tell myself, a ledger balanced. And sometimes—only sometimes—I will write it down here, tracing the fault lines and revelations of a journey that is, inevitably, into the self.