WillSpirit!

Our acupuncture office has closed, officially and permanently. As we acceded to the inevitable, fortune smiled on us, in that another physician acupuncturist liked the space and assumed the lease. He also purchased some of the furnishings and equipment, which was helpful financially but also saved us the trouble of moving and storing heavy items.

Breaking down the office my wife and I worked so hard to set up made me sad, but at least there wasn’t much doubt about the decision. The business had been struggling from the get-go, and the many problems had stressed us both. After hospitalization I was left with a new source of pain (in my abdomen), worsened neck problems, limited use of my left arm due to nerve compression, and heightened psychiatric instability. Continuing to practice with so many impairments would have been impossible and also unethical, so finding someone to take over the space felt like a Godsend.

Oddly, it hurt even more when I revised my acupuncture website (this link will eventually be deactivated, but it’s good for now) to announce the practice closure. I’d invested a great deal of time in building up the site’s design and content. Posting an announcement to kill the project left me a bit shaken. But I see a positive aspect to this response: it shows how much I enjoy fussing with websites and how much creative energy such work absorbs.

It’s part of the reason I’m planning a big reorganization and upgrade to this blog’s format. The initial template that I chose in 2009 has long since been abandoned by its developers. I’ve been adjusting and altering it for years, and I’ve managed to keep it functioning, but there are many glitches and I lack the expertise to fix them. So WillSpirit will be moving to a new and more robust template soon.

The updated appearance will be less quirky and more pedestrian; it will look like a typical website. I’ll miss the old format, but change cannot be avoided, especially in technological realms.

I am currently organizing the archived posts into categories. The old Tag Cloud system is also being revised and is currently disabled. I apologize for that inconvenience, by the way, though I’ve never believed tags all that helpful for finding pieces of relevance. My goal is to make the new site a place where people can more easily find articles pertaining to their needs and goals.

So, in summary, a treasured but difficult and failing project has ended. This frees up time for me to further develop WillSpirit, which requires attention anyway. One endeavor ending, another reviving. Life moves forward.

On balance, I feel better about all this than expected. The acupuncture practice was supposed to improve our financial situation, but it actually ended up costing a great deal and did not appear destined to become very profitable. The answer to our budget issues appears to be ever-increasing frugality, especially as prices continue to rise. But one gains a spiritual boon in learning to get by with less, so I’m OK with tightening the purse strings.

I’m OK with everything these days: the new pains, the new sorrows, the ongoing uncertainty, the new directions. Through all this uproar my sensitive soul keeps learning. For instance, it’s nice to finally feel convinced that life doesn’t need to be comfortable to be valuable. I embrace it all, come what may.