Every December I come up with some malarkey, outwardly expressed or not, about how things are going to be different in the new year. A friend said something sensible to me recently about our foolish Yankee ways, wherein we transition from a holy (insert holiday here, or not) to this upbeat honey-do list of upgrades and achievements for 2009.
For days I´ve had these two lines of TS Eliot´s Ash-Wednesday stuck in my head like the world´s longest running poetry earworm:
Teach me to care and not to care
Teach me to sit still.*
I should clarify here that 1) I took a class in college which was, I think, devoted in part to Eliot and this poem because 2) I was entranced by the professor, a tortured-by-inner-demons type with deeply expressive eyes, and 3) even though I understand a fair amount of the religious reference I´d still feel like an idiot discussing it, although don´t let that stop you if you´d like to enlighten me.
Teach me to sit still.
It´s some kind of meditation for me now, in lieu of screaming at the twins at bedtime because their gd wet towels are on the floor of the gd wet bathroom. Again. To care or not to care? I mean, somebody has to care, but I don’t care to care, at least not right now.
Teach me to care and not to care
Teach me to sit still
But does that person even exist? Where is she?
*checking the verse online reveals the correct version as published:
teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still
Cribbing from Wikipedia: “Published in 1930, this poem deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith in the past strives to move towards God.” Also …isn’t there an Old Testament reference along the lines of, Be still and know that I Am God? Here’s an interesting discussion of the Hebrew, I wonder whether it’s correct. Okay, now I’ve wandered off into religion. Please don’t flame me.
How intense, and beautiful a poem. I’ve never seen that one before, and now I will have to spend hours unpacking it. Yum. A fragrance of a poem, isn’t it? Elements, some familiar and some exotic, put together in an elaborate way into something that wafts meaning and thought, and grows and changes as you wear it/meditate on it.
There was a blog … I need to find the link. Where the blogger got perfumers to compose fragrances around a poem, Pound, I think.
google memory desire perfume in a poem
the blog is called memory & desire
it stopped after that, too bad. Powerful, beautiful stuff.
Here you go darlin’ — I’m a big fan of Heather’s — I hope she starts posting again someday, if not on perfume then on anything else she’s thinking about: http://www.memoryanddesire.net
Thanks. Those were amazing. And I love the image that’s up there right now. And then she just … stopped! Wah! 🙁
Ok, deep breath, and let me think where to start since I am hopelessly inarticulate. You’d think I’d be better since I spent a semester studying Yeats’ News for the Delphic Oracle. 😕
“To care and not to care.” How can you do both? If you look at it in relation to time, you can care in the here-and-now, yet realize that in the vastness of eternity, it is a small problem, and not one to command care. If you look at it in terms of overall impact of your actions, you can both care and not care. For example, I used to volunteer with an animal rescue group. People would often ask me how I could do that work, when the needs were so enormous and we could save so few. I cared very much about the animals we saved, but I chose to acknowledge that there were many I couldn’t save, and “not care” about that. If I had been overwhelmed by what I couldn’t do, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything at all. That caring and not caring led to the stillness Eliot prays for. Call it surrender, call it acceptance, call it knowledge, call it stillness.
Really, I’m much more articulate when discussing nail polish colors.
And Spore? I already spend way too much time at the computer. 🙂
Yeah, but this is GOOD for us. Every now and again we have to look beyond our nails (although mine are a pretty dazzling green right now…. where were we?)
Care and not to care. Your example is wonderful. Certainly I am guilty of being overwhelmed by the enormity of something and then feeling like my efforts are futile. In that sense, detachment I understand immediately.
And I think you’re plenty articulate.
Things do happen for a reason huh? Maybe I was meant to find this blog for more than just perfume camaraderie. I keep attempting to write you a synopsis of the book (as much as I have read so far) but I think the time will come and you will read it and you will get from it what you will. Thanks for opening your heart, as I feel that many of us (esp us moms) struggle with the same exact things you do, and it’s affirming to hear you put voice to that.
Hey, thank you for coming on here and chatting with me! I looked at the Tolle book last night and am wondering if I should go back and read his prior one first? 😕
I haven’t read that one yet. I guess I’m a back-asswards kinda gal=p~
okay – a few comments on the Hebrew link ( and yes, I eventually make a point!):
1) picky but the reference in the link is incorrect – that line is actually line 11 in psalm 46, not line 10
2) Hebrew is different from English in 2 ways that affect the translation of the reference. Everything starts with the stem which is three letters that get additions of other letters and vowels to make verbs, nouns, etc. The stem for the word translated as ‘be still’, when this same stem is used as a verbal noun (gerund?) it also has the same letters as the verbal noun from the stem for the verb curing or healing. Thus, commentary I have read also discusses that knowing G-d exists and that we are not in control, this knowledge is a form of spiritual healing. A healing that allows us to ‘be still’ as the world swirls around us.
3) Second – word order isn’t always as important in Hebrew as in English. So you can also interpret the same sentence two ways – in this case be still and know G-d or know G-d and be still. The implication is that if you are looking for holiness and spirituality in your world/life – be still and you will see it, it is there, you just have to open your eyes to it. And by being still, in turn, you will see the holiness and spirituality. Kind of a positive feedback cycle.
You can now use the same cycle with the other possible interpretation based on the gerund for healing – by looking for the holiness/spirituality in the world, you bring a healing (also sometimes translated as repair) to the world and that the healing or repair of the world (or your part of the world) allows you to better see the holiness/spirituality around you – the holiness/spirituality becomes more revealed and can heal your world even more. Another positive feedback!
So seeing beauty and spirituality in the small things, being still and wondering about and contemplating these things, this being still brings healing(caring) into the world (the link to the TS Eliot poem?). Even stopping to ‘smell the roses’ (had to add a perfume link!) :))
okay, what is with those emoticons? That was supposed to be
🙂 @};-
I love the crazy laughing emoticon. It’s kind of Buddhist really, isn’t it? A good reminder to not take life too seriously. It gave me a good laugh after reading your beautiful words. What a gift!
That is a good emoticon for this post, isn’t it? I’m sort of wild for our emoticons, even though they’re ornery.
Can I just say how much I am enjoying this discussion? It makes me feel like I’m doing brain calisthenics, in a good way.
I love your information about the Hebrew and being still and the word order. This is all new information to me, and I am grateful for it. The multiple interpretations fascinates me, I would assume it provides for some hefty arguments in Judaism? But in this case the multiple meanings are helpful and provide different kinds of guidance. And thank you for sharing it with me so eloquently. @};-
Two words. Yoga. SPORE.
(No, maybe not SPORE…as if we need another addiction!)
Yoga. Don’t get me started, it will make you laugh. I’ve done yoga on and off for 15 ? years and I’m not very good at it (not very flexible, poor sense of balance) so physically it is precisely what I need. But I find my inability to do a lot of the flex poses so irritating that I endlessly compare myself to others, even though intellectually I know that’s soooooo not the point. Seriously, roll your eyes and then pray for me. Gnashing my teeth and sulking because I still can’t get my heels to the mat in Down Dog. /:)
OTOH I found out there’s a weekly meditation class near me, do you think I should try it?
PS I have to look up SPORE. wth is SPORE? 😕
Vida?!? Offering a virtual addiction??? Oh, dear. I’ve had to de-Spore a few students…
If you don’t know SPORE, you probably shouldn’t even go anywhere near SPORE…I was up til 3am last night evolving…Shelley, you SO need to deSPORE me before I create a diaSPORA of addicts…
and BTW, this is one of your most beautiful poetic posts…
I’ll do my best, Vida…but results are SPORadic.
Thank you. I am afraid to go look at SPORE.
No flaming here. I am in the middle of reading Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth” and am finding it very calming and it touches on what you are talking about. (I knew I was going to get something out of his writing when he opened his book with a meditation on flowers and their scent and how they can help bring you to enlightenment). His writing has helped me *begin* to understand what it means to detach from the transient and attempt to live in the present. It’s a challenge, but of course an opportunity to be more open to your life. Something I have struggled with for many many years as our western culture is so incompatible with this (typically) eastern philosophical tradition. But Tolle does make it more accessible, and I do recommend his book if you have not picked it up yet. I was skeptical about it, but a dear friend who is a kick-ass, hilarious writer highly recommended it, so I gave it a whirl and I am grateful that I did.
Okay, here’s today’s weird parable for you. Our holiday season kicks off in early Dec. at the local Methodist church rummage sale, which we attend as a family because it has an excellent bake sale, and a book sale. In the books was A New Earth, which I took a pass on because it sounded so New Age-y to me. Somehow it wound up in our huge bag of books, though, when I got home. It’s sitting in my to-read stack now. Since it followed me home, and you recommend it, I’ll move it closer to the top. :)>-
I responded below, it wouldn’t work earlier to do it here:-?
Our threading feature is sometimes a little kerflooey. I think it’s from hanging around with the emoticons. :-j
Detachment is a big part of the Christian as well as the Buddhist contemplative traditions. In the gospels somewhere, Christ said that one has to hate one’s family to follow Him. This hard saying reminds me of the Buddhist one: “when you see the Buddha, kill him!”. Once we say, “I need this object” or “I need that person”, we are in trouble, both Christ and Buddha would tell us. It is consuming desire that is the source of human unhappiness (and of what the Greeks called hamartia, missing the mark: translated typically as “sin”): the attachment to things and people. And if one is attached to the things of the world in this way, one can’t (I think Eliot might be saying) be still – stillness is, after all, the opposite of striving after the object of desire. Elijah’s encounter with God came not in the wind or the earthquake, but in the hearing of a still small voice. One has to be able to listen to hear such a voice – and that’s where the practice of stillness comes in. Even when everything is in chaos around us.
I keep delaying my response to your comment. You’ve hit on the aspect of these contemplative traditions (such as I understand them) that are the most difficult for me. I’ll call it the someone’s-got-to-do-the-cooking conundrum, jokingly. The gap between the detachment and the reality seems insurmountable to me. And these are the parts of the Judeo-Christian faith that I often find most disturbing. On one level, faith is detachment. The story of Abraham and Isaac still makes me weep — the ultimate detachment from earthly desire, yes? To be willing to sacrifice your own son? And reading again online, there is argument about the Hebrew translation — did Abraham *trust* God or fear him?
Okay, I’ve really gone off on a tangent here, I’m sorry.
Our Western culture holds us to dualism–we can either be detached or care, we can’t do both. But in fact, we CAN do both. We can care deeply about a manuscript as we write it, and as we send it out. And then it gets rejected, and we care about it still, but now we look at it and say, “Huh. I wonder if I should change the main character to a drunkard after all?” And we are detached, while still caring.
So Abraham can both trust and fear. Or, to quote more Eliot (forgive me if I don’t get it quite right) “You cannot say or guess,for you know only a heap of broken images, where the sun beats and the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, and the dry stone no sound of water. . . come in under the shadow of this red rock,and I will show you something different from either your shadow at morning striding behind you or your shadow at evening rising before you. I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” At the risk of sounding like a *koan*, the detangling of these questions is exactly what brings stillness and meaning. It is the part of the journey in which you leave your marks.
Oh, that’s beautiful. I got myself all tangled up thinking about this last night — in a good way, but I’m out of practice on the thinking, in a concentrating way, if that makes sense.
And your example of the manuscript was perfect.
March, I think of the someone’s-got-to-do-it conundrum as “Martha’s complaint,” as in, the Martha who was doing all the cooking and cleaning and tallying up of bills while Mary Magdalene poured all the available (and very expensive) spikenard oil on to Jesus’ feet. I long to be Mary Magdalene, but I am still far closer to Martha… Perfume is one of the ways I work out this inner debate.
I have resisted the idea of detachment for a very, very long time, partly because I don’t like the way it lines up with a very Western narcissism in certain New Agey circles, and partly because it seems like the very opposite of the argue-’til-you-die tradition of my own Jewish heritage. But lately, I don’t know. I think I’m sort of getting it. Partly because of the sheer, ridiculous repetitiveness of my crises and feelings. It’s like — why hang on to this feeling when I know it’ll be back around in a minute and keep coming around until I understand whatever I need to understand from it?
I hear a couple of threads in your post, though. One is the struggle to just be and let whatever is coming rise to the surface. To get out of your own busy way. Another is the fear of how that might affect the ones you love–a fear that you won’t be able to carry on as you are. I wish you all the love, luck and courage in the world to face the latter. I will say, though, that these changes are often (though not always) much larger in the mind than in the life…though that doesn’t always help much in the interim. /:)
Happy New Year, my dear. 😡
Fine. Come sit next to me on the bench. Can I tell you a story? I’m sure I can.
One of my memories of my youth is when the new, young pastor of our flock of sheep at Faith Lutheran was telling the story of Mary and Martha as part of his newfangled audience-participation “forum” in place of the sermon. As he was extolling Mary’s virtues, my mother, one of the invisible legion of church ladies who’d been there since 6 am (making the coffee, turning the lights on, folding the bulletins etc.) stood up and declared her total infuriation with the lesson and how they were all d*mn lucky all the Marthas of the world didn’t throw up their hands in disgust and walk out, and he could make his own d*mn coffee next Sunday with the lights out and see how he liked it.
I was sort of in awe of her (I think I was 9 or 10?) and then horrified, but man, do I understand how she must have felt.
So. In my own family dynamic I am your go-to, get-it-done gal, but I am tired of being the b!tch — the organizer, cruise director, weekly calendar, object finder, manners minder, maid, valet and butler. In short, mom. 🙂 And daughter and a few other roles (nice pickup on that btw). And if I am going to do it with such bitterness and gracelessness, I either need to find a new way to do it or it’s not going to get done. I am as sick of me as everyone else is. Hearing you on the sheer, ridiculous repetition … let me OFF! Am also reading Revolutionary Road at the same time, which is kind of a humorous combination.
Oh I *love* that story, thanks for telling it!
The Mary/Martha story has always infuriated me, too, and so did all the stories I read growing up where the good girls were either boring tattletales or ethereal beings who eventually DIED while the spunky bad girls got all the readerly sympathy. Somehow they feel related.
But….but…
[insert various circular arguments made for the hours of 2-5 a.m. here]
One of the things I’m finding at this riper age is: beyond the basics people (and this includes kids) will manage just fine if you lighten up your physical and psychic load. ’tis YOU, my dear, who might have the most difficulty with this, not them.
My mother died relatively young and the thing I most regret is that she didn’t tell us all to go jump! I would’ve vastly preferred that she lived her life rather than stressing about ours and always being in a depressed, resentful state. Hemstitched pillowcases (or ugly-assed afghans =)) are nice…but a mom who is a relaxed, happy, fulfilled person is way better!
And don’t bite, but I’ve come to suspect that the Martha ‘doing’ concept is an excellent way to hide from ‘being’. I find myself ‘bizzifyin’ like that in our business – and it is absurdly counterproductive.
My start for the New Year? I quit making dinner every night – and that was a toughie for me. Truth is, though, I hate having to plan menus 7 days a week and actually EAT at night (something I am not always wont to do). Now, on the days I don’t want to cook, I simply don’t. El O always manages. Like cats in trees, it’s unlikely you will find El O’s emaciated corpse clinging to the refrigerator door. He raised 3 boys by himself – he can feed himself. And you know what? He couldn’t care less and it’s helped us a lot, since I don’t hate him because I’m cooking while he’s watching the news!
xo>-)
Hey, whose afghans you calling ugly!!! Look out or I’ll be sending you a new present for your bedroom… 😮 😉
You’re right. And my mom was like that too, and I wish the same thing.
The dinner thing I am not even going to touch for fear of detonating (a HUGE hot button issue around here) but will laugh and say that my mind is sufficiently off that when I read your “Martha” I was thinking of Martha Stewart, and in a way that’s just as apt.
Part of wrestling with any sacred scriptures is realizing that what you’re reading really p*sses you off … Psalm 137:9: “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.” Oh, really?? And what’s THAT all about??
I am among other things a licensed counselor … part of my training was learning how to observe my own responses to my clients, and seeing them as fodder for the therapeutic mill: if this person’s behavior angers or bores me, chances are it angers and bores the other people in his/her life. It is not about me … and it is about me. One learns to hold both viewpoints in a kind of creative tension when one is doing therapy. One cares about one’s clients, but is prepared for the day when the client completes therapy, or walks away, sometime with no explanation. One cares and not cares at the same time.
I suppose that has something to do with how I view detachment … one cares about things, but at the same time one is a detached observer. It’s nothing New-Agey, I think, it’s a well-tested response to the suffering and frenzy of life that’s been worked out in several of the great religious traditions.
Regarding the Mary-Martha problem … those who are interested might check out “Breakfast at the Victory: the Mysticism of Ordinary Experience,” by James P. Carse. Or the Jacob the Baker series by Noah ben Shea. Both deal with the everyday as the ground of mystical experience.
Thank you for this post. It is a source of amusement to me that my interests range from lipstick and perfume to enlightenment.
I have no problem sitting still, and have taken to using L’air du desert marocain with a heavy hand when my spirit doesn’t want to sit still with the rest of me.
Just one more thing…. to me ‘to care and not to care’ means to care without making a judgement as to rightness or wrongness about people and their actions. It is NOT apathy but a freedom from judgement.
And there you just put your finger right on what I struggle with (see above). Freedom from judgment vs. apathy. And on another level, action vs. inaction. Responsibility vs. observation? Check out my Protestant work ethic’s fingerprints all over those ideas. 🙂 My Lutheran upbringing?
Right…there’s the trick…to care, and to not care…going to speak to this more just above in the Thurible Thread.
Clearly there was something wack going on with the comments yesterday, other people mentioned trouble.
many thanks, march, for your thoughtful and eloquent post. a part of my job is to teach (periodically) ash wednesday, which i enjoy doing, not because the students like they poem (they tend not to: too grave, too churchy) but because i love it so much. what i take from the line you quote (and it is such a compelling line) is the idea, elaborated over the entire course of eliot’s career, that we are transformed not by what we will, or choose, or resolve to do (happy new year!), but radically, profoundly, and mercifully *in spite of* whatever we will or choose or intend. the only valid act, for eliot–and for the psalmist, as your link made delightfully clear–is the act of surrender. he describes this surrender in greater detail in the last part of The Waste Land:
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
of course, my own kids can attest that i’m as good at surrendering as i am at picking up my own wet towel, but i do believe that eliot is right, for whatever that may be worth.
so thank you for your movingly serious and sincere remarks. all very best wishes for a truly happy new year.
And thank you for such a thoughtful and enlightening comment. And for making me smile with your admission about your own failure to surrender.
But this then becomes the circular argument in my head (good for 3 a.m.): look at all the vast learning it took/takes to explain this. Look at the educational line drawn from Eliot to you to your students. Look at the machinery of the education that strives to explain this surrender to us. All of that seems on some level to be the absolute opposite of a surrender of any sort. Part of my problem is that from where I stand, surrender can look like ignorance, or a failure of responsibility.
PS NOT TRYING TO BE ARGUMENTATIVE. Trying to be … discussive. I am sensitive to not feeling like I peed on someone’s ideals, I am exploring a topic. :)>-
This is how I solve it, in the moments when I think it is “solved” (but it isn’t, it is just at rest/in balance)…
One has to go un-linear. The circular narrative postmodernists attempted. Time folded upon itself as well as progressing forward. Sometimes we know something, arrive there again, and know it a different way. But still understand the old. So sometimes, it takes a lot of education/training/thinking/time to get there. And sometimes, we realize we are just there. But remaining “there” — well…
Don’t you think, March, that your gut will tell you when you need to take action? Or that your gut will tell you when to pull back, if you are already in action? You yell at the kids for leaving wet towels, something in your head asks why. You walk past the litter on the ground, you ask why. I think that ultimately, we rarely rest upon a point of balance, but it is incumbent upon us to seek it.
You are absolutely right to ask about work vs. surrender, responsibility vs. apathy, etcetera. I won’t even try to dabble in the land of definitions beyond dichotomies–though that could be useful, and really what I tried in the second paragraph–but let’s make it WiiFit. Sometimes you work your muscles really hard to keep that green dot in the center. Sometimes, magically, it’s there, and you have to “work” to not interrupt its stillness. Balance. It’s tricky.
(I tried to send this yesterday…something wiggy going on…regardless, other folks have now said what I was trying to with greater clarity…but wanted you to know you had me thinking…)
I’m not sure I TRUST my gut, though. My gut is on freaking DEFCON 2 all the time. BWEEP BWEEP BWEEP Mice in the gutter, bills on the desk, honey in my daughter’s hair. I need to get my brain off the treadmill.
If you can accept that what it took for Thurible to get there is simply part of the journey I think it’s easier to incorporate that into ‘stillness’. There are so many more learned, eloquent explanations on this blog that I won’t attempt my own clumsy imitation – I will say, though, that one of the first things you can do on your journey to ‘stillness’ is to stop worrying about stillness. Take your breaths where you can, create them when possible, as long as the creation doesn’t become all about the act of creating it… and simply revel in the glory of your existence.
That’s what I’m ‘doing’, anyway!
xoxo>-)
I think we are saying similar things, but you managed it so eloquently. Thanks!
Oooooohhhhhhh, your alien just morphed! So cool! Wonder why it only does it sometimes?
He’s kinda pertickaler….
xo>-)
I love T.S. Eliot and I almost never understand him. “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is my favorite poem of all time, but most of his work is like a complicated perfume you have to unravel note by note. My Eliot earworm is always “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each/I do not think that they will sing to me.”
Nothing helps me sit still and not care like valium and a glass of wine.:d
Oh, I love your Eliot earworm. That’s a good one to have stuck in your head. I’m also fond of The Waste Land, although it’s completely baffling.
The middle way . The Tao . To witness and not be swayed .
There’s a fine line between religion and spirituality…what you think or what you feel .
These are the times all ancient manuscripts refer to as the end times…a good reason to examine what you think and what you feel .
For every end there is a beginning .
Ok , down off my soapbox .
My husband has been exploring this, as part of his Eastern travels. I am alternately delighted and frustrated by the bits I grasp. And yes, certainly in my life there’s a big overlay between religion and spirituality. It’s hard to resist the impulse to *do* something.
In one line there is so much to contemplate: Knowing when to care. Knowing when not to care (and for me, understanding when to to let go).
I also need to work on the sitting still part, as keeping very busy is a way to avoid examining my life (and we know what the unexamined life is…)
At least we are able to find the time to contemplate and reflect, and one new year’s resolution is to make more time to do this.
You website is a source of pleasure and joy for me, and today, moments of reflection from a beautiful poem.
Have a wonderful 2009.
You too, Nancy. @};- Obviously, some of my reflection winds up for better or worse on the blog, where I feel I can kick it around with people who aren’t invested in me driving them to the mall or cooking their dinner. /:)
Screaming at the twins over them leaving the towels frankly ain’t that bad. (the inner Mommie rearing it’s head) Eventually kids have to realise that there isn’t going to be a maid or Mom to pick up after them, and that’s a lesson they can lear now or later when it’s more painful. Tell them for me. I’m still waiting for someone to come dust. But I understand about caring and not caring.
It’ the sit still part that I need to work on. Friends practically have to lash me to a chair to keep me from flitting off to the next thing. I’ll get up in the morning on a Sunday and decide for the heck of it to drive to Santa Barbara for guacamole or ride the Metro from Beverly Hills to Long Beach to Woodland Hills and back to BH. I think I’m happiest when I’m moving to the point where the destination is superfluous. I wich I was one of those people who could languidly loll on a chaise reading Proust. I want to be zipping down PCH or the Grand Corniche or the Merritt Parkway with the top down
I like the kind of movement you describe too, although in a slightly different flavor — I love to walk in the city with no particular purpose. I realize you live in LA and thus your version is slightly different. 😉 But wandering around NYC or Paris or London or Florence just to be moving is one of the great unfettered joys of my life.
Good for you. You have discovered the rare fact that we do not *find* meaning in life, we *make* meaning in life.
New Year’s Resolutions fail largely because we don’t have support–our family and friends don’t want us to change because if *we* change, they have to, as well. And they don’t want to get to know the new us and figure out how the new us fits into their lives.
Being still is a big accomplishment. It comes in various ways. It takes time. I encourage you to seek it. Nothing else is quite as wonderful. I know because helping people find meaning in their life and being still to hear it arrive is what I do for a living. And in the next several weeks, I will hear the clamor of reasons why “I can’t change,” and then, slowly, see new people emerge. That vision and the following reinvention is more intoxicating than any perfume.
Don’t give it up. Change is inevitable, growth is optional.
As I was reading this I was remembering you are a life coach, and thinking you must be a good one.
I am not very good at being still, but I need to get better at it. It’s hard to learn how to *not* do something.