Living Deliberately Strategy: Triathlon & Really Living 02 Mar 2009 05:34 pm
“WHUMP!!!….(echo, echo, echo…..)”
That’s the sound of me falling on my Triathlon-seeking butt about a month ago. Um, over and over again. The effects have been a little personally reeling.
Thing is, when you spend a year ardently training and pushing your body to try harder and harder towards a goal, the effects are multiplicitous. It was a good stress reliever. It eliminated my back and shoulder pain. I fit my clothes better and didn’t worry about indulging in cupcakes. It helped me have an eye towards a future I had some level of “say” in, whereas most of the big picture is completely out of my hands. And meanwhile, the American universe became progressively effed-up on the large scale; the smaller picture of a fitness goal was a soothing distraction.
And so life went through the previous year. I knew all along that finances were going to prohibit my “spring’09″ race goal (can’t afford the bike). I knew January would be hellacious (legal crap of gargantuan proportion, business all around hitting the skids). And so it was. Add 1 cup accompanying exhaustion, a sprinkle of the flu, an uncertain amount of anemia and “womens’ issues” and lo and behold a month had passed with zero work outs.
So flip the above: I was now stressed out, the nerves in my shoulder and neck are pinched daily, I’m frustrated with my clothes and think about every calorie. I got some bonus stuff in there too, like periods that wouldn’t stop and insomnia. The biggest deal is that I’m overwhelmed with the “big picture”.
An hour ago I watched Oprah. Her topic today was on how America now faces a “wake up call” and the stories were about families learning what they can live without. An hour before that I was gasping through my first serious run in almost 40 days (and sheesh..goal followers will remember I’m a crap runner, so “serious” still means under 3 miles!). And an hour before that I was contemplating this first day of Lent, with it’s emphasis on “lightening” what we depend on, fasting, etc.
It turns out, that in ‘09, I still live a pretty “light” life. I reside in a camper on my parent’s property; my children have rooms in the house. All of my belongings, save the clothing I’ve accumulated over the past 18 months, my toiletries, and a few books, are in storage. I own no major item (though I do, for the first time in my life, have my name on a jointly owned vehicle). I create art for walls that don’t exist. I work in a “cyber” realm. And most of my time is spent either analyzing or recovering from the past, or eagerly hoping for the future, either for myself or those who are in my charge.
Very little of it is tangible. I don’t really care at the moment whether this is right or wrong…it just “is”: I feel like I’ve given up or let go of or had tested every essential and I’m ready to nest again, live a “normal” life, accumulate things, have a space I call “mine”. In this span of years comprising my adulthood, I’ve been married, divorced, buried a child, moved many times, homebirthed, homeschooled, and let go of the daily tools my identity has a “wife and mother” touched. You’d be surprised how much it hurts to see familiar knives and forks, sheets, and baby blankets sitting in a box, and spend every day of every week using others’.
The most applicable thing I’ve heard in months was this: “Don’t attach to a method of attaining a goal”. Whoa. Hearing that was like…well what was it like? Wind on sweaty skin. Water on a dry throat. A thorough hug after months of just co-existing untouched. I’m GOOD at goal setting. And I tend to be the kind of girl who knows what she wants to aim for. In the past couple of years, when forming whole sentences in prayer was just too damn hard, I parsed it down to single words. These are my hopes, my goals. I can make the daily steps that keeps them a priority but I can not predict what kind of method through which they will be attained. Life is just to unpredictable for that.
So, for instance, I could pray, “love”, but who would have seen him coming? I certainly didn’t. And yet, here love is. I made a few choices, and cut a few things that made room for love to come, and grew a few things that helps love to stay, and then forces bigger than I sent it my way. And I can pray, “calm” but there are several things I will do through the course of many moments and days that result in calmness, no one thing being enough on it’s own to get there.
I ran today. And I worked and attended class and those will both aim in the direction of the goals I’ve set. I don’t have any idea about the rest of the method. Maybe, like Elizabeth Gilbert said, I just need to “show up and do my job”. Today I did it. The genius can do the rest.