The leaving is part of the work

A physiotherapist in Abha is moving to another city at the end of the month, and she has eleven patients halfway through their recovery.

Most of the attention in a move like hers goes forward. The new clinic, the new flat, the first week. That is natural, and it is also where things go wrong, because the old work is still running and nobody has told it.

Leaving well is a skill of its own. It means finishing what can be finished, writing down what each knee and each shoulder taught her, and placing every patient with someone who will carry on the same plan rather than start a fresh one.

Almost nobody teaches it. School teaches beginnings. Careers are described as a string of starts. The gap between one thing and the next is treated as dead time, when it is usually where the damage happens: the customer who was promised a call, the half-built project with no owner, the person who hears from a stranger that their contact has gone.

There is a balance in it too. Stare only at what comes next and the current work quietly suffers. Refuse to look ahead at all and the next thing arrives as a shock.

I think the people who do this well are not the ones with the smoothest exits. They are the ones who accepted from the first day that a next thing was coming, and so treated the handover as part of the job while there was still time to do it properly.