Fasten your seatbelts. It's gonna be a bumpy life.

"Pace yourself, honey." What a weird word – “pace.” Picante sauce, velocity and repetitive worried walking… One idea I’ve been pondering lately is the concept of pacing myself. I’m old and conscious enough to recognize overarching themes in my life. Since last Fall, I’ve been grappling with the issue of control on a huge, 1000-foot level in my life (though the seeds of this struggle go wayyyyyy back). Let me see if I can get some perspective: Since we got engaged, I have been on a binge of busyness and doing. I worked too much. We planned a wedding and bought a house in less than 6 months. We decorated the house and I built some serious gardens. These actions are not, in and of themselves, the problem. I’m beginning to realize the problem is my inability to stop at reasonable intervals and truly let go of whatever it is that I’m working on. Oh sure, I might take an evening off, but I’d spend the whole time churning over whatever it was that I was obsessed about at the time. If I had several days off, I’d just fill them with more projects. It came to a head last fall. I’d been working a 40-hour contract for one client, plus picking up extra work to keep my hand in with other clients. My dad’s health was declining. Didi was in the hospital and out. I was fighting bamboo in the garden and planting beds in my spare time. Oh, and doing other service-oriented stuff on the side. I swore the excess work was short-term, so we could afford to have the bamboo dug out, get the house painted, etc. Except that I couldn’t stop. We took the week of Thanksgiving off, as reward for all of our hard work. And what did I do? I planted shrubs on Thanksgiving freakin’ morning – not so much because I wanted to but because I had to. Finally on Saturday night, Mike sat me down and we had a big talk about how much I take on, both literally and mentally. My constant churning was hurting my sanity, my spirit, and our marriage. And I didn’t know how to stop. Over Christmas, I took a few steps forward. I decided to end my 40-hour contract and go back to counseling to figure out how to get out of this hole. And then, the bottom dropped out – Granny died, Dad died, Didi died. One big lesson I got from their deaths is that none of us have any control over our lives on a fundamental level. I’ve grasped that about my music and my love life in the past. But now I’m being asked to recognize it and accept it at the deepest part of my heart. The grief process also forced me to allow myself a little more downtime — I simply couldn’t function without it. But in my attempt to “go with the flow,” I had adopted a strategy of saying yes to all the work that comes my way, thinking that my higher power would sort it out so that everything got done and I still got some downtime, if I could just “surf” the flow. That worked like crap, quite frankly. I got to the point where I was angry every time the phone range. Sure, sometimes the waters parted and I got an afternoon to catch my breath, but by that time I was so angry and anxious that I couldn’t enjoy it. That leads me to where I am now. My friend Af said there’s a part of me that is furious because I promised myself a break a long time ago, and I haven’t kept up my end of the bargain. I take time off, but fill it with “have tos.” So, she suggested that I not take on any more work until I finished the projects on my plate and took a few days off. I’m in the wrap up phase now. It’s petering out incrementally and annoyingly slowly. On the one hand, a part of me is delighted and relieved. But in other zip codes in my brain, things aren’t so happy. “Pace myself?” What am I, some sort of invalid? It feels like I’m the only one who has to use training wheels. Though it feels like I’m finally getting to the real issue, I’m going to stop for now and write more later. See? I’m pacing myself.