Time For Peace

On Thursday morning, I ran a Thanksgiving road race in my town.  It is one of those races I run each year just for the fun and energy it gives to me when I show up.  I love the tradition of starting Thanksgiving morning with a number of my friends and spending five miles worth of strides being thankful.  In all honesty, on this particular course, with it’s gentle inclines and beautiful coastal scenery, it is more difficult to not be thankful.  

For this race, I have my own tradition of picking up race bibs for my friends and delivering them the night before the race.  I have been doing it for years and I really enjoy it.  It’s a little thing I do that really seems to be appreciated and being able to help in just a small way, the friends in my life whom have helped me  so much, even new friends, it’s my way of demonstrating my gratitude for the friendships and blessings of my life.

In the past five years, Thanksgiving has proved to be a starting line of difficult memories, a course filled with land mines of darkness, resentment, fear, loneliness,  and despair.  I brace myself for the impact of a holiday season thats supposed to be happy and filled with joy, holding my breath, hoping that somehow just a little bit of that joy will permeate through the fortress I build around myself just to survive.

I have always been able to find things to be thankful for on Thanksgiving, but lurking just beneath the surface of that gratitude has been this unquenchable fear of those memories, that no one, no matter how close to me they may be, can really understand how painful it is when you're supposed to be happy and your heart is still shattered and your soul is still at war.  

But over the course of this past year, I began taking my own therapeutic advice.  I often tell patients insisting on focusing on their problems and deficits, to turn their heads and look at the good stuff, the stuff that is working, the stuff that is still there, that is not lost.  I have found that redirecting their focus has made incredible shifts in the progress of our sessions and so as I caught myself telling a patient how simple it was to just turn your head and look at something good, I knew I had to do the same.  I had to shift. And I began doing it. Everyday. There is always something good. 

So on Thursday, when I ran the race, I noticed a lightness under my feet, a freeness.  I wasn't trying to run fast or hard. I wasn’t bracing for anything.  I realized, I had finally done it, I had let it all go.  I had forgiven that past and I let it go, I wasn’t carrying it around with me any longer.  I was simply enjoying and having fun.

I crossed the finish line, running my best time for that course,  “It’s time”, I thought, “It’s my turn, my time for peace.” And in the perfect moment of this beautiful Thanksgiving Day, a group of us, found each other.  I looked around at all the familiar faces, my friends, people who helped me through my journey without knowing that they were gently pushing me and encouraging me through one moment at a time. I looked back down the road, the course I'd run so many years, each year releasing and leaving behind another piece of rubble from  a broken past.  But that war that raged on these past few years in my soul is over now, the rubble scattered behind me and all that is left is love and peace.  I am so loved and so blessed and so incredibly thankful.