Am I scared? A tiny bit.

It’s funny what happens when you do things the same way for so many years, and then one day you wake up and say, I don’t want to do life this particular way anymore. Sometimes it’s not even that your particular life or business is bad, it might even be really good. It just isn’t what you want anymore. That very thing happened to me at the end of last year. I have been simultaneously grieving letting go of what I’ve built and also moving more toward what I want at 58 years old.

This morning I realized two things: that I’d ridden my bike 2000 miles already this year (more than I’ve ever ridden in four months, ever) and that I’d read 17 books since January (also a life record for this time period). Those two metrics are important, not because they’re special (lots of people ride their bikes many miles and read a lot of books), but because of what they represent in my own life. And that is that I am really prioritizing what makes me happy right now — and what makes my nervous system calm — over work for the first time in a very long time. I haven’t even finished closing my retail business, and I’m already doing it. I have been gradually slowing down the hamster wheel for four years now, and I’m about to step off.

Am I scared? A tiny bit. But I’m mostly excited about the vast unknown of my future. For the record, I’m not retiring, just doing fewer external projects, focusing more on my creative practice than selling stuff. Cheers to that. The beginning is now.