Running is pretty much how I have described my life these last many years. Running. My boyfriend would check in with me to ask how it’s going and I’d answer, “I’m running. whats up?” Two kids, two different schools – one of them an hour away, a non profit, forty employees, a whole town asking for me. Running. From one commitment, to the next meeting, to the friends house, to the vegetable market, home, out with the boyfriend, home and up at five. Running.
And then, in just a few short years it all faded away, the nonprofit evolved into new leadership, the kids grew older, the boyfriend tired of running after me, dropped out. Although it didn’t all happen suddenly, it felt like it did and one day I woke up and wasn’t running anymore. No one to visit with, no kids to take anywhere, no relationship to fail to maintain, no organization to run. No running.
And so I have been quiet and “in my cave” as I call it. With nowhere to go I was forced to go inside, to spend time in the shadows of dreams still incomplete. No one has ever said that transitions are easy, but I sure wasn’t listening if they said that they were this hard.
These days running has taken on new meaning. Running today is the physical action of one foot in front of another, out the door… a few miles…a few miles back. Running. But unlike before, my running of today isn’t symbolic of not enough and not fast enough but rather a metaphor for my work towards the future. One foot in front of the other, up the hill panting and wheezing, the voice in my head wants to stop but the metaphor in my mind equates my physical pain with my internal struggle to believe that I’m good enough, that I’ll be able to make it to the top just one more time and so in that moment when my body cries out “enough!” my grit pushes on. I know this mountain, I’ve been here before, my legs move faster as I push over the hill and down the backside, I feel like a superwoman, a tired one, but a superwoman and for that brief minute in real life as I stretch my legs and lead with my heart towards home I can pretend that I’ve found my moment again.