Had breakfast this morning with a friend of mine who's a Lt. in the FDNY. He used to work in Brooklyn but he's in Manhattan now, and sometimes when he's worked a night shift we have breakfast before he goes home. A lot of firefighters also work another job because the schedule permits it (and in some cases the low pay demands it). My friend was an engineer before he went into the Dept., and he's kept up his registration and has been working for an engineering firm for the last few years. Today he was telling me he's decided to back off that and spend more time with his family, his ailing father, his basketball team.

He was saying, though, how nervous this makes him. And this is exactly the position I find myself in right now. I'm leaving the day job I've had for 22 years -- I'm an architect by profession, which is how we met, the Lt. and I, before he became a firefighter -- and I'm nervous too. Our reasons are different: he's thinking that when he finally leaves the FDNY and wants to go back into engineering he won't get hired because he'll have been gone so long. I'm thinking I'll miss having a place I HAVE to go to, having a schedule and something to do that I can actually accomplish. That's not a small thing, especially on days when the writing isn't going well or on days when, like this one, one book's done and the next isn't ready to start and I wonder why I'm on this earth.

But putting your full weight down on something -- for me, writing; for him, his family and friends -- changes your relationship with that thing. The nature of that change is what I guess we're both hoping will make it worthwhile to give up what we're giving up. What's made it harder for both of us is, we actually LIKE the work we're quitting. If we had nine-day weeks I think we'd both keep the jobs. But as nervous as I am about cutting that line -- or as Keith Snyder says, about letting go of the rail -- I'm excited about the change in my relationship to my work.

And I have to say, if a guy who was crawling through a window in a cloud of smoke at 3am can be nervous about something, I guess it's okay for me to be nervous about it, too.