For your dual, if belated, birthday greeting - having missed your post yesterday but read it carefully today - I can think of nothing more appropriate than a short passage from something you may well be familiar with, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, by Jack Kornfield, Bantum Books (2000) at pp. 184-85:

In May of 1998, at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center, we hosted a large benefit for the medical care of Ram Das [fka Richard Alpert, PhD], who had suffered a major stroke the year before. After almost a year of rehabilitation Ram Das was able to talk, although haltingly, and he still groped for words. At the end of the day his wheelchair was placed on the stage so he could speak. Noting to much laughter that he had been warned it was tacky to come to one's own benefit - and that's why he came - Ram Das addressed his predicament and the question of identity.

For years I practiced as a karma yogi, the path of service. I wrote books about learning to serve, about how to help others. Now it is reversed. I need people to help me get up and wash my bottom. And I can tell you it's harder to be the one who is helped than the helper!

But this is just another stage. It feels like I have died and been reborn over and over. In the sixties I was a professor at Harvard and when that ended I went out with Tim Leary spreading psychdelics. Then in the seventies I died from that and returned from India as Baba Ram Das, the guru. Then in the eighties my life was all about service - cofounding the Seva Foundation, building hospitals, and working with refugees and prisoners. Over all these years I played cello, golf, drove my MG. Since this stroke the car is in the driveway, the cello and golf clubs in the closet. Now if I think I'm the guy who can't play cello or drive or work in India, I would feel terribly sorry for myself. But I'm not him. During the stroke I died again, and now I have a new life in a disabled body. This is where I am. You've got to be here now. You've got to take the curriculum.

Happy Birthday!

Mike

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ps And speaking of past lives, Ram Das grew up as the son of the president of the New York, New Haven Rail Road!