Where Are You Going?

Thursday, April 27, 2023

“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”

Lao Tzu
 
Does that quote get you? It does me. When I read it, what immediately came to mind is how my shoulders have started to hunch forward and how 10 years from now, maybe just five, I might find them collapsed over on the front side of my body instead of back there where they belong.

And you? Maybe the direction you are heading has to do with your thought patterns. Or your finances. Maybe it’s your spiritual life or lack thereof. Or could be it’s your stress. Whatever it is, incremental change is so easy to ignore as one week slides into another and another and, meanwhile, we gradually become what we repeatedly do.

Any area of our life can get away from us, but stress is one of those agents of change to keep special watch out for because it is so easy to normalize and accept as simply the water we swim in, as if there is nothing to be done about it. And then one day we find ourselves having become a joyless person or someone who can’t ever turn off, a person no longer recognizable to ourselves, a person of diminished light.

And of course, right here in the physically and emotionally demanding field of healthcare, stress and burnout are far too common. While self-care cannot indefinitely make up for the effects of an over-taxed industry, there are important and impactful ways to preserve oneself while systemic challenges are worked through.

All you have to do is click the hyperlink to read all about it and register. Each talk offers an opportunity to take your body and mind in good direction, a direction worth going in.
 
For myself, after reading, “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading,” something did change in me. It opened my eyes to the picture of future me with folded-over shoulders. I just couldn’t un-see it. I’m actually a little shocked at how that vision of the hunched version of me turned on the light, because I can read any number of impactful things that I would love to take root in me, but they don’t. The time just hadn’t yet been ripe. But this one appears to be and now I have a little shoulder angel following me around, gently nudging me to hold myself up. And a few times a day I toss myself face down on my bed (handily just around the corner) and do a few Superman - style shoulder blade crunches.

So where are you heading? Does it appear to be someplace calling out for an intervention of some kind? Is there something you could do to turn the ship a degree or two? Wherever you are headed, hopefully it includes dropping in for one or two or all three of those powerful talks. It doesn’t hurt at all to have those sorts of tools on board.
 
Cheers to us as we head off into another brave new day.
 
E