The Hot Run

I'm not sure when it happened, and looking back, I'm thankful that I didn't realize it was transpiring, or I would have been devastated.

But somewhere in the mix of celebrating an avid, daily running regimen, I withered on the vine and my go-to practice fizzled into an occasional 2 or 3-mile jaunt, small potatoes for my repertoire.

Sick of feeling in a rut, I re-worked my play list, grabbed a loud running skirt, stupidly neglected to bring water and headed out for 6 miles in the hot sun and the high humidity.

I will grant you that there are insane mother fuckers out there who thrive on running in the heat and do quite well, that is definitively not me.  Resolute that I would not make my come back on a treadmill and resigned that it's just as hot at 7am as it is any other time of the day, I sucked it up and went out.

At first, this happened...envision being in a sauna where you keep looking down at your toes, sweat drips into your eyeballs and you just can't get a good breath.  Then, going up my first hill, I panicked, thinking, I'm going to get dehydrated (which upon reflection was probably a smart piece of intuition), but nonetheless, I was committed.

Three miles in, I sunk into the reality of the fight. The hot run is an official bitch baby.  And then this song came on...

 And I just kept pushing and believing and hoping and praying and wondering...who am I?

What can I do in this life?  Who do I want to be?

I hallucinated back to a podcast exploring the difference between knowing and following your curiosity.  We live our lives thinking that we should know exactly what makes our heart song complete with the ability to claim our passions and live our lives linearly.

When the truth is, particularly if you're middle aged, like me (God damn it, that's still so weird to write), you recognize that life is finite and guaranteed to no one and that it's okay to change course, try something new, get busy getting interested in something that sparks wonderment or intrigue.

Aside from running, writing, moving a small business forward and familying...I'm still trying to stay open to what lies on the horizon for me.  What makes me trepidatious (in a good way)?  What do I wish to infuse into my being?  Where do I crave to spend more of my time?  What if I hate it?  How will I know?

By the time I explored these topics, I was drenched.  Ridiculously so.  But I had completed the mileage and made it back to my front door, barely.

It seems to me, that curiosity is where it's at and that knowing is for the birds.  Passion is powerful...but it's often singular.  The world affords so much to sink into...to feel, to know, to incorporate, to try-on...here's to wonderment...but maybe with a little less humidity.

A Call For Passion

I don't know what age it starts to happen.

I'm sure it's different for everyone.

And probably happens many times over the course of a lifetime.

But it's that point where you find yourself going round and round, over and over, again and again wondering how you'll differentiate this day from the next.  Even if the purpose behind the mundane rituals and routines makes sense, the conflict emerges when your being is tired of making the same concessions.

I remember first experiencing this feeling when I was 21...working in downtown Chicago at a prestigious public relations firm.  It was a fantastic internship on paper with great opportunity for full-time employment post college and upwardly mobile connections to people in a city that I longed to live in for sometime.  The problem, I suppose was that the work was boring as hell and so one day, I told my supervisor that I wanted to write and not just to assemble media packets...to which she very kindly said, "sorry...that's not part of the job."  It was eye-opening.  Because there were other really wonderful ancillary perks like tickets to sporting events, hobnobbing with industry gurus and of course having nice lunches and Starbucks coffee while in a suit.  But, at the end of the day, it was not full-filling.  And so, I counted my blessings to have the resume filler, but I knew that I wasn't passionate about the "work."

I felt disillusioned, but I suppose my idealistic philosophy-degreed self was optimistic and so I carried on...searching this time for passion in places that weren't connected to my employment.  Sometimes, I found it in really good friendships, intimate relationships, poetry, prose, my graduate program and eventually in marriage and motherhood.

But every self-help book will tell you that now more than in any period in the history of both marriage and parenthood, we require more of our unions than was ever expected before.  We yearn for economic security, an intellectual equal, amazing hot monkey sex, safety and the promise that our partner will always be the only one to truly know us and to make us happy.  Simultaneously, we want a family.  Children that different than even one generation ago, we will know fully and completely.  That we will be unconditionally devoted to and present for every step of the way.

And all of this coupled with organic, yoga filled, cross-fit crazed healthy living, continuous volunteering in the community and care for our parents who are living longer makes the concept of wanting to have passion in your life...well, just another thing and a frivolous one to tend at that.

But when you check your social media feeds, the posts that generate the greatest amount of traffic and volume of popularity skew towards the inspirational.  The quotes like this one from the late Nelson Mandela...

"There is no passion to be found playing small-
in settling for a life that is less than the one
you are capable of living."

And that is because whether you are 21, 35, 60 or 90...you want to feel something beyond responsibility, obligation, duty and the like.  You want to viscerally feel alive.  You want to know that you're living your purpose and that the opportunity to recourse or engage in something that makes you feel not only needed but that you desperately desire is possible.

This is passion.  It's just that it's hard to jive it with the mundane...but if you're able for a split second or a brief window to grab it, harness it and fly with it...well, you feel like all of the rest is doable.

The question is...how do you grab a hold of passion and still keep the bills paid, the family needs attended to and the world happy with what you've given?

I think this is a question that I profoundly knew 20 some years ago and over time did what we all do which is to settle for the good of the cause until somewhere between the peanut butter sandwiches and the laundry, I started to yearn for the visceral feeling again.

Vincent Van Gogh said that he would rather die of passion than of boredom.  While Albert Einstein said that he had no special talents only to be passionately curious about the world around him.

And so maybe that is the key, to recognize that life is filled with seasons...cycles of mundane, boredom and obligation that turn our hearts toward longing and ask us to ask ourselves, what am I curious about and how can I make space for the exploration in my daily routines...because the truth is a life lived without passion really is as Mandela said, no life at all.

500 Pieces of Writing

This body of writing marks my 500th blog post.

It seems crazy that I've been doing this for so long and yet, when I think about it, it just feels like what I do, an extension of me.

I started this process almost four years ago when my oldest was 6, my middle daughter was 4 and my youngest was 6 months old.  I needed an outlet.  A place to vent the parts of me that were consumed in care giving or had been back burned for far too long.  I thought if I was lucky, it might last a year and then, I'd move on to the next thing.

To be fair, there's been no rhyme or reason to any of the writings.  Most of the posts have been inconsistent and thematically, tend to revolve around the same things...the beauty and chaos of mothering, the identity of a stay at home crazy woman, the love and loss embedded in the decade of the 30's, the hopefulness and fear of what it means to be 40 and the prayers of a woman who desperately wants to create meaning and to carve out purpose and joy.

So what have I learned?  To begin, I've  reconfirmed a few things that have always felt intrinsic to my soul... I'm in love with the gray area and the parts of life that don't add up.  I seek out stories in me and in others that are formative, that make us who we are but aren't often brought up in polite conversation but are desperate to be told. And to that end, I fancy myself a seeker, a yearner, a truth teller, a woman passionate about uncovering the hidden parts that are both magical and frightening.

I've learned that I love the hell out of cursing.  It's fun, it's cathartic and it's real.

I know that running as much as writing  and writing about running help to manifest both physical and spiritual wellness in every part of my being.  Each run I've taken has lead me deeper into places of discipline, consistency, strength, hope and usually triumph over some facet of the unknown.

I've become mindful that I write to make sense of me in the now and in the after...which is vividly captured in this quote by one of my favorite authors, Anais Nin who says, "We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."

For me, particularly in this season of my life, there is so much wisdom garnered in reflection.  The kind of parenting that I subscribe to has me knee-deep in the trenches the vast majority of the time and while the days are long, the years are remarkably short.  They really are flying by.  So, if I don't stop and sit with where I'm at, it's gone, really in a flash.  And there's so much here.  So much life to be grateful for.  So many stories and adventures along the way.

So, if there's one thing I regret...it's that I haven't written more.  On any given day, I have a myriad of words, sentences, dialogues wrapped up in my head and surging through my veins.  They come at me while I'm washing the clothes or the dinner dishes, while I'm helping with home work or sinking into a long Saturday morning run, when my youngest is having a colossal melt down at Target or while I'm screaming at the kids to stop screaming at each other.  They're teeming begging to be in the world...and not because I think there are so many readers dying to engage them....but because they are an extension of me.  And if the world needs anything, it needs more authentic pieces of all of us in it.

So, here's to 500 more and another how ever many following.  If you read regularly, thank you for encouraging me and for sharing in the written journey of my life.  It means more than you know.

"The Deep Blue Sea"

Last night my husband and I watched the 2011 flick, "The Deep Blue Sea" starring Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston.

If you've not seen it, below is a brief clip:




The film is set in post WWII London with a stunning 30's something Weisz who is in a passionless marriage with a late 50's something partner who is wholeheartedly, beyond a shadow of a doubt devoted to her.

Along the way, she meets and falls desperately in love with Hiddleston, a man her age who excites every part of her being...but cannot promise the same undying, unconditional affection that her husband freely doles out.

Unable to control her feelings, Weisz is cataclysmically torn between the two until fate decides and ultimately, she is tortured.

Such is the beauty of life.  Would you rather be in a safe, passionless union or a volatile, alive partnership?  The question is sort of timeless and probably plays out across the world daily. 

It's the trade offs we make in life.  But knowing that you only have one, what would you do?