For thirteen years, I knew exactly where I would be at 9:47 on a weekday morning – at my desk, second cup of chai going cold beside a stack of KYC files, the ceiling fan doing its slow, indifferent rounds above me. Banking teaches you many things. Punctuality. Precision. The particular dread of a month-end that falls on a Monday. What it does not teach you, what it quietly un-teaches you, if you let it is how to leave.
I don’t mean resignation. I mean the smaller, daily leaving. The 6 p.m. kind. The kind where you close the drawer, switch off the monitor, and walk out with your whole self intact, not just the tired husk that answers to your name.
I was terrible at it.
The concentration risk nobody flags
Here is where my old professional instincts refuse to stay retired. In banking, we have a term – concentration risk. It is what happens when a portfolio leans too heavily on a single borrower, a single sector, a single point of failure. Any auditor worth her salt would flag it immediately. Diversify, we would say. Spread the exposure. Never let one asset become the whole book.
And yet. For over a decade, I ran my own life with a concentration risk that would have failed any inspection. One asset, work held nearly everything. My sense of competence lived there. My identity lived there. Even my conversations at family dinners circled back there, the way a river keeps returning to its oldest channel.
Nobody flagged it. There is no regulator for a life.
The irony is not lost on me: I spent my days scanning documents for what they obscured, what they assumed, what they conveniently left out and I never once turned that lens on my own calendar. If I had, I would have found the gaps. The hobbies listed as “reading” that had quietly become “scrolling.” The friendships serviced only through forwarded messages. The book I kept meaning to write, filed under pending, financial year after financial year.
What the sabbatical showed me
When I stepped away from the branch for caregiving, for family, for reasons that arrived without asking whether the timing suited me, I expected to feel unmoored. And I did, for a while. When your work has been your load-bearing wall, removing it makes the whole structure groan.
But here is what nobody tells you about stepping away: the light gets in.
I noticed it first in small things. The way Little Miss tugs my dupatta towards the window when the pigeons gather on the ledge, her whole body a question mark of delight. The way an afternoon can hold an entire chapter of a novel if you let it. The way my own sentences, the ones I write for no deadline, no circular, no compliance requirement started sounding like me again.
I began reviewing books. Writing essays. Publishing poetry. Building a little corner of the internet where the risk-auditor and the reader in me finally sit at the same desk: except this desk, I leave whenever I please.
The case for walking away (daily, deliberately)
So let me make the argument the way I would once have written a credit note with findings and a recommendation.
Finding one: work will take everything you offer it and ask for more. This is not malice; it is simply its nature. A desk does not know when you are depleted. Only you do.
Finding two: the things that make you you: the reading, the cooking, the terrible singing, the long call with an old friend, do not survive on leftovers. They need scheduled deposits, not spare change.
Finding three: no one on the other side of a sabbatical, a retirement, or a health scare has ever said, I wish I had stayed later at the office. Not one person. I have checked.
Recommendation: diversify. Not someday, today. Leave on time once this week, and notice that the building does not collapse. Put a book in your bag and actually open it. Say yes to the evening walk, the wedding, the child holding out a crayon and pointing, with great ceremony, at the blank page beside her.
Your work is one asset in your portfolio. Let it be a strong one I am proud of my banking years, every audit and every late sitting of them. But a portfolio of one is not a career. It is a liability waiting for its moment.
I ran every audit except the one that mattered. Consider this essay my compliance report, filed late but filed honestly: the undersigned confirms that a life beyond the desk exists, is verifiable, and yields returns no balance sheet can capture.
Step away. The desk will keep. You might not.
This post is a part of Beyond the Desk Blog Hop hosted by Manali Desai and Sukaina Majeed under #EveryConversationMatters blog hop series.
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