Maybe that's just the thing about it.  It's like the restaurant business itself.  You have to be in it.  You have to be there when it's busy, when you're in the weeds.  You have to immerse yourself in the flow.  You do what you can, extend yourself on some days, retreat on others, as it will make you nervous, and I've always worked in places that would make you nervous, and I suppose we all have.

But in order to think in such a way, to begin to figure it out, you have to be in certain nervous situations.  That's when you realize you need yoga, meditation, calm, a fresh perspective and distance from Ego.  And this turns out to be the guiding light in life anyway, rather than any fixed plan you might have thought out, drawn up.  Maybe you have to be in a 'when things fall apart' kind of a situation to be reunited with your humanity, I wonder.  There's just a certain math to it.

You can't put it together yourself, at least not rationally, and so you have to rely on something else, on the kind of confessional poetic aspect of the mind and life itself.  Is that where you find yourself, when you've been sort of knocked on your ass?