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I was forced to hit the "Pause" button this week! Two days ago, I was hit with vertigo and nausea completely out of nowhere. I first experienced it at night when lying down and it was especially bad when having to turn. It's frightening when something like this happens as one doesn't know what's going on.  Thanks to some excellent info provided by doctors and individuals on the internet, I had enough reason to think it's what's termed Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (or BPPV), caused by crystal(s) moving through the fluid in one of the inner ear canals.  I did the prescribed maneuvers to move the offending culprits out of the inner ear and today I am feeling leagues better. 
Today I am feeling incredibly grateful simply to feel like myself again.  I am keenly aware that I had no options but to release my usual attempts to control, to get lots of stuff done, to criticize or gossip because there wasn't any energy to do so!  So why waste my time with these things now that I feel better again?  Why not keep it all a bit more slowed-down instead of driving, driving, driving?  Why not "Do Nothing" but savor a few moments here and there?

 At 59 yrs. old, I am sometimes faced with the fact that I'm not a "professional".  I not a "this" or a "that".  When I was a kid and people would ask me "What do you want to be when you grow up?", my typical answers were, "A renaissance woman" or "A Jack-of-All-Trades"  (We didn't have Jills-of-all-Trades back then!).  I held to that commitment throughout life; playing many different melodies, dancing different movements.  I see many people in my age group, and even much younger, are doing this thing that Alan writes of.  They are running for the end of something, thinking THEN they will be contented, successful, happy, loved, etc. They imagine that, when they retire, they will have another 20 vital years to do everything they've put off!  Sometimes they are aware that they've bought into something, a career, job, relationship, ideology, that has turned them into a slave.  But they no longer have the resiliency to break out.  They've allowed that creative capacity: to play instead of work, to dance instead of drive, to atrophy.  So they find their "fixes" in order to tolerate the grief of being dead while still living.  Life isn't a linear thing.  Life is spherical.  It expands in all directions.  Our capacity to reinvent ourselves is the result of practicing with letting go of getting anywhere, letting the mind serve the heart, and approaching things with child-like curiosity. 

I love this post, particularly because it's not about doing more or better, but tending to the little garden that is our field of reference. As I've grown "old", I've accepted that I've not become who I thought I was going to become; someone who made a difference to a lot of people. Or, perhaps it's more like, "I've not become someone who will ever be acknowledged in public ways."  Ah, that's different isn't it!  Either way, it doesn't matter.  It's not for me to decide how many people I will impact or whether I'll be recognized publicly or not.  It is only for me to be a good person for the person who is right in front of me; to be helpful for the situation right in front of me.  Whether it is for the "hungry ghosts" in the form of the baby boomer fashionistas I serve as a retail salesperson, or for a millennial co-worker who keeps diving into the closet to text, or for my ailing senior kitty who needs anti-seizure and chemo meds everyday, or the trade show vendor who needs two dollars for the parking lot "pay" box, I try to give my best in being a real human being for them.  Sometimes my best is to take shelter in silence rather than pretend I'm someone who I'm not.  Taking care of my three millimeters also means sitting in meditation every morning, eating more wholesome foods than not, walking to nurture my spirit, and not having an internal dialog with despondency when it comes to visit.