I have always been ‘Doer’, even as a child. I made plans and then I carried them out. My sister and friends were involved in all sorts of complex projects…a lean-to hideout built with spare plywood between the house and shrubbery, a rock polishing factory, a jewelry making production using poor Daddy’s colored wire, a cemetary in the woods for smashed toads from our street, and of course a school full of doll students under the apple tree. I was always busy.

My son still calls me ‘Busy Bee.’ It is hard for me NOT to be busy. Sometimes, this habit leads to what I call ‘Bad Busy.’ I wrote a post about this phenomenon on my other blog back in my busy days. (Link below)

Now, I have ended up on the other end of the busy spectrum. I cannot be active in many ways. There is a real risk that my injured hip will pop out again. I know pain, that was the worst yet. No drug could stop it until I was totally knocked out and intubated to pull the ball back into the socket. My right leg was visibly shorter.

So much for hiking trails alone for a while. That was my plan for April. I hope to eventually get there after physical therapy and two months of healing.

But for now, I have been forced to stop doing and start being. It sounds so cliche, but this has been hard for me. Being busy allows you to lose yourself in activities. Sometimes doing is an escape from being.

All that action is a distraction from reflection. It can be a way to avoid and ignore what is going on inside your head and heart. Once I stopped and rested, I looked around and was puzzled by my life.

Nothing was like I thought it should be. I know, ‘should’ is an expectation word with baggage. I know all about baggage. I rarely put anything down. I am a ‘History Hoarder.’ My past gets pulled along behind me like a wagon full of treasure and trash.

So me and my wagon have had to pause on our journey. The ‘Being Me’ is looking into the ‘Doing Me’s’ wagon. Whoa! What a load!

Do I really want to pull all this to the next phase of my life? Absolutely not.

So ‘Being Me’ is physically resting while mentally  purging the wagonload of her past. This is a necessary step. I will not go so far as to call it a silver lining to this cloud. It has been painful. It is mentally exhausting. There has been a lot of reading and writing and thinking along with the healing.

My sincere hope is that when ” Busy Bee” flies back into action, her load will be lighter, her path will be brighter, and her hip will stay where it belongs so that she/me can finally find where we belong.

FLOW with wagon in tow.

Bad Busy