I'm 78 now, staring out at my rhododendrons, the azaleas a vibrant shock against the gray stone, and sometimes I feel this somatic ache, a phantom limb almost, for a life I never lived. The whole career, auditing corporate financials, it was a precise kind of work, very structured, almost a compulsion, but God, I just wanted to get my hands dirty, to sculpt the earth, you know? To design a space where people could actually BREATHE instead of tallying up depreciating assets. It's a fundamental miscalibration, I think, a cognitive dissonance that just… persists.