It starts on the way home. Ten minutes, fifteen if the traffic's bad.

It's muscle memory, repeated patterns over long periods of time, so you're away from the building and down the road before you even realise you started the car.

That's a terrible way to describe how I engage with driving, but most of you will know that when you get in the car now, you don't think about driving like it's the primary task.

My mind isn't free of the task of driving, but it's almost like autopilot, so my mind then drifts to everything else that's been pulling on it.

And what's been pulling on it is the mental arithmetic I often find myself going through.

The funny thing is, they're not real numbers. They're not numbers you'd think of in a spreadsheet, or in Xero or whatever other accounting software.

What's in the account?

How a video did? How many people came through the door this week?

The maths I do in my head in the car isn't that. It's the private ledger where I decide whether I'm winning or losing.

And tonight the ledger says I'm losing.

Rather than run a critique on that and check my facts and so forth, I think about the exit.

Can I do all of this?

I lay all of it out like a heads-up display on the windscreen, almost like Tom Cruise in Minority Report, pulling all these different fields together to try and get to some arbitrary conclusion.

I'm trying to figure out whether I should stop or not. The funny thing is, I don't feel it's cataclysmic. I don't feel fatalistic around it.

It's just a process my mind goes through.

Would it be easier to retreat to something smaller and known, something I walked away from a long time ago and could, if I'm honest, pick up again by the end of the month?

It's not a dramatic pull.

If anything, it's the opposite. It's the warm, ordinary pull of a life that would ask less of me.

It's only recently that I've been able to say this out loud, or look at myself going through this process from afar and critique why I do it and what it affects in me.

Inevitably, it doesn't start with a bad number. It starts with how I'm feeling.

I've had plenty in the account before and felt nothing. I've had next to nothing in the account and felt completely certain I was heading in the right direction.

For me, over the last fifteen years, figures and feelings have never really kept step with each other.

When this process starts in my mind, it isn't that the evidence turns up first and the feeling follows it. It's that the feeling arrives first, whether I'm flustered, whether I'm tired, whether I'm convinced I'm failing, and then it sends my mind out to fetch the numbers that prove the belief correct.

Whether it's rumination or fatalism, it wears a calculator to make itself feel respectable.

Here's the beguiling thing: the calculation never gets solved. No number ever comes back in my favour and closes it. No clean realisation arrives. I don't pull into the driveway having worked out that staying is the sensible choice.

The calculation is still sitting there unfinished when I switch the engine off.

What ends it is duller than that.

I'm too bloody-minded to act on it. There are people counting on me to turn up, and somewhere under all that noise, I've already decided I will.

That's it.

Not insight, not resolution.

Stubbornness, backed by a sense of duty to the people I serve, which means I hold this until my mood lifts and the ledger goes quiet on its own.

The quitting maths never really gets answered. It just gets outlasted.

Paul