The redemption of a Type A personality is a subtle thing.
The pace of life on permanent vacation reverberates with a nearly imperceptible thrum. Like whispering ocean waves, you may know this hypnotic rhythm from some beach vacation you took to get away from your work-a-day life.
Some people call it Island Time or Vacation Brain.
By any label, it’s a dialing-down of the artificially fast tempo of this modern life. Keeping up with the Joneses and striving to achieve the “success” everyone has been trained to want demands a frenetic pace that wears on your psyche’s delicate mechanisms.
That precision equipment was honed over millions of years to detect and to explore elusive sounds, smells and sights. Today it’s misused over our lifetimes by the repetitive, hammering routine of life in the fast lane. Its sensitivity eventually wears down.
After decades of running well past its prescribed RPMs, its responsiveness dampened, our ability to truly experience and to simply be in a moment is lost.
I am happy to report, however, that the rehabilitation of those roaring Type A traits is not only possible, it’s happening faster than I could have imagined.
“I’d rather die while I’m living than live while I’m dead”
Jimmy Buffet, Growing Older but Not Up
In the two short weeks since we started living in Libbie full time I’ve discovered that the heavy-handed, hyper-planning gremlin that drove my ambition and career for years has settled comfortably into the back seat. From that unfamiliar position it quietly watches the landscape go by and only comments on the occasional bump in the road.
To my amazement, it hasn’t impatiently elbowed its way to the driver’s seat where it knows it can call the shots and step on the accelerator.
Instead, it seems content to sit and watch, transfixed by all the things it realizes it had been missing out on all along.