Eleven months out of a thirty-five year finance career, and I’ve noticed that every conversation about it arrives at the same place. Usually inside four minutes. So are you going to do some consulting? It’s asked kindly. It’s meant as a compliment, a polite way of saying you’re clearly not done, all that experience has to be worth something to somebody. I’ve started hearing a second question underneath it, though, and the second one is harder to answer over a beer. What are you for now? I don’t have an answer to either one. That’s the actual state of things. Eleven months in, and I’m still genuinely undecided about whether I want to go back and do a smaller, cleaner version of the work, or whether the whole idea is me trying to keep hold of something I already set down. This image is clearly AI generated because I’m not that old, and would never drink coffee out of a mug that small. There have been feelers. Three or four, depending on how generously you count a coffee. Nobody has put a scope or a number in front of me, so I want to be careful not to make this sound like more than it is. It’s the soft version. A former colleague who says we should talk sometime. A text from someone I worked with a decade ago asking whether I’m taking anything on. A catch-up that was ostensibly a catch-up and had a shape to it by the second cup. What I’ve learned from those has almost nothing to do with the work and everything to do with me. Because I know exactly what happens in the ninety seconds after one of them lands. First I’m flattered. Genuinely, unguardedly flattered. Somebody remembered, somebody thinks I’d still be useful. And then I get tired. Before there’s a project, before there’s a client, before anyone has said a word about what the thing would actually be. The fatigue shows up ahead of the work. I’m a numbers guy, so I’ll call that what it is. That’s the cleanest signal I’ve got. Flattered first, tired second, ninety seconds between them, every single time. But I don’t fully trust the signal, because there’s a real case on the other side and I’d be lying if I pretended otherwise. There was work inside those thirty-five years that I loved. Not the calendar. Not the eleven o’clock reforecast, not the eighth version of a deck that was fine at version three. The problem itself. Walking into a finance function that’s being held together by one spreadsheet and three people’s memories, and working out what’s genuinely broken underneath the noise. Sitting across from a controller who knows something is wrong and can’t quite name it, and helping her name it. I was good at that. I was good at it for a long time. Being good at something for three decades and then simply never doing it again is a peculiar thing to sign up for at 56. And consulting is supposed to be the version that keeps the good part and throws away the rest. You take the problem, you skip the politics, you leave before the reorg. Somebody else owns the outcome. That’s the pitch. Here’s my problem with the pitch. I spent years on the buying side of it. I hired those people, I scoped those engagements, I know precisely what two days a week means in practice. Two days a week means two days a week right up until the thing gets interesting or goes sideways, and then it means whatever it needs to mean. A scope is an opening position, not a boundary. And I would care. That’s the whole difficulty. If I could do it at 40 percent I’d have said yes to something already. I have never in my life figured out how to do work I care about at 40 percent, and I don’t think a business card is going to teach me at this stage. Except none of that is really the reason this stays unresolved. If it were a scoping problem, I could solve a scoping problem. Two clients maximum, defined deliverable, no travel, no operating role, out in ninety days. That’s a twenty-minute exercise for someone who did this for a living. The reason it stays open is that I can’t tell whether I want the work or whether I want to be wanted for the work. From the inside those two feel identical. They are not remotely the same thing. One of them is a preference, and preferences are easy, you just follow them. The other one is a hole where a job used to be, and hiring myself out to fill it would be the most elaborate and expensive patch available. So here’s the part I’d rather not put in writing. I’ve turned down two of the feelers. Politely, with the true reason, which is that I’m not sure what I’m doing yet. I’m not confident I meant it either time. Both times I got off the phone and felt relief for roughly an hour, and then something closer to disappointment moved in behind it and stayed the rest of the day. That is not the emotional profile of a man who is finished. It’s also not the profile of a man who wants back in. It’s the profile of somebody who doesn’t know, which is where I keep landing no matter how many angles I come at it from. There’s a practical fact I keep underweighting too. We don’t have a house. Everything we own is in a storage unit off a highway and we’ll be living out of short-term rentals through the rest of this year. Making a decision about the shape of my working life while I don’t have a permanent mailing address is almost certainly bad sequencing. Some decisions want a floor under them first, and I don’t have a floor, I have a lease that ends in six weeks. The other thing I’ve noticed is how much of the pressure to answer comes from outside. Nobody in my house is asking me this. Beth isn’t asking. The question comes from the room, from the pleasant social need for a retired guy to have a next thing so the conversation has somewhere to go. And I’ve been answering it as though I owe the room a resolution. I don’t. The room will be fine. What I’ve actually done in the meantime is smaller and less impressive than a consulting practice. I write most days. I show up for the family logistics that used to be somebody else’s problem because I was on a plane. I read more than I have in twenty years. None of that photographs well as an answer to what are you doing now, which is probably why I keep feeling the pull to have a better one ready. So the question stays open. It’ll get asked again this week, four minutes into some conversation, in that warm way people have when they’re trying to say something nice about your career. Are you going to do some consulting? I don’t know. Eleven months ago that sentence would have felt like an admission of failure, something to dress up before saying out loud. Now it just feels accurate. I’ll take accurate.