The name of this website/blog, as you know, is Dancing Upside Down. The title actually did not come about because of the brain injury. I appropriated it to this blog because it seems to fit my trajectory of recovery as well as the name's original intent.
The name came about shortly after I had watched the video of a talk called The Last Lecture given by Randy Pausch at Carnegie Mellon. (If you have not seen The Last Lecture, carve out an hour in your day to watch it. Click on the title to get to the unabridged version which is by far the best.)
The Last Lecture's subtitle was "Achieving Your Childhood Dreams". Randy did this talk as a way to impart wisdom he wanted to give his children, knowing that he would not be around to do it himself as that he was dying of pancreatic cancer. The talk was and is incredibly inspiring.
Randy's lecture instructs young people on how to set goals and achieve them, how to ask for and accept help, how to recognize the opportunities in your vicinity and use them. It is guiding them in the steps needed to succeed and be happy in life; its showing them the dance steps.
But what if you are someone who did not receive that guidance when young? What if you are in your 50's. How do you regroup and try it again? I watched The Last Lecture at a time in my life when I was looking back over my last 50 years and preparing to reinvent myself for the next 50. When you learn to Dance later in life you are:
Dancing Upside Down
I feel I am someone who must learn to Dance Upside Down. I am reinventing myself because of the brain injury. I am reinventing myself because I would not want to continue doing my old work anyway because I was so tired of the traveling.
(I was a large scale project manager - which meant I had to go to the projects and be on site for at least part of the time. We were supposed to have travel be only 30% of our job description. We decided the 30% was just describing the time we spent in airports and airplanes!)
I want to explore the questions of why some people are "late bloomers" or are unhappy for whatever reason and want to reinvent themselves. I especially want to explore how people go about it. How do people reinvent themselves? How do people make the second half of their life "count"? (With respect to the fact that what "counts" will be different for different people.) That leads to other questions. How do people decide what "counts" and what doesn't? I would love to explore and understand enough to write a handbook of ideas and useful techniques for non-bloomers who want to bloom into late bloomers.
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