“I need to decide,” he said. “I’ve been doing this for months and I’m no closer than the day I started.”

He had argued both sides so convincingly that the argument had become the trap. In rooms full of people, he could carry the case either way. Alone at three in the morning, he could not carry it at all. He told me what the board thought. He told me what his family hoped. He told me what his younger self would have envied and what his older self feared. The words came quickly, efficiently, like a man who has rehearsed a presentation so many times he no longer hears it.

“Which way should I swim?” he asked. “You’re the coach. Tell me.”

I asked him to turn the first page of his stack face down.

He did. We sat in a silence that lasted long enough to become useful. Rooms have a way of going quiet in the moments before someone tells the truth. You can feel it if you do not rush to fill the space. When the quiet had changed in quality, I pulled a legal pad between us and wrote a single sentence at the top.

It was not clever. It was not original.

But it was alive in a way that his question was not.

Ten years from now, what do you want an average Tuesday to feel like?