Running Again....And Miles To Go

I turned 44 this year.  I have been running a lot again. It started with a goal earlier in the year to complete a 50K which I did primarily solo with my good friend running almost 5 miles with me, showing up at a moment at which I was seriously considering quitting.  And somehow in the process of working towards that goal,  the joy of running miles found its way back into my soul and I now find myself outside again most mornings breathing, moving, just being alive in the quiet of the day’s dawn. It’s funny because so much has shifted and moved in my life since I “ended” the original sneakers n wine, yet I am somehow still finding myself doing the same, running miles, sipping wine at night.  So much about just those two things have changed though too…. I’m pretty set primarily on white wines now and not every night and when I run, I don’t just run miles, I am trying to push myself. I find myself on more trails now as well.  I’m not running to prove anything or forget or cope or away from the past as much as I am to live and be the best version of myself in that moment, moving towards a new tomorrow full of opportunity.  

 

I won’t lie, it’s harder to motivate as the days get darker and colder, but once I’m out there, I feel a freedom and strength within myself, a runner high that I just can’t get enough of these days.  

 

This is my favorite time of year to run.  Everything around us teaching us all what matters if we pay attention.  I think about this as I move.   The leaves like dead stories of summer and the year past, cloud my path I’m running on these dark mornings.  Sometimes the stories cause me to slip and lose my balance when the ground beneath is wet or damp from the dew.  Sometimes they crunch into dried up broken pieces under my weight as I continue forward one stride at a time.  Either way, I know in time, they will be packed up in compost bags, removed, and used to help new stories grow.  But isn’t that what life is? Let those dead stories go and serve the purpose of allowing the new to grow.  Sometimes the past slips us up, causes us to lose our balance like those wet leaves on the dark pavement but when you become strong enough to catch yourself and avoid the fall, you can keep moving forward and learn to step more carefully.  Sometimes the past is meant to be broken under the weight of the stronger person we have become and grown into, so I welcome the noise of the dead leaves crunching beneath as I allow what no longer serves me to become nothing but dust.   

 

It is finding the strength within my true self on these miles I most love.  This time of year, it is gratitude that most enters my mind while I run.  Gratitude for how far I have come and for the life and opportunities I have been gifted. Gratitude for the relationships that have healed over the years  (including the one with myself) and those that have fallen away, some crunching beneath my feet still, others just taken off on a blustery breeze across the sound to float off somewhere I may never know.  Gratitude for those relationships that remain and those that have just begun.

 

Many years ago, at a time when the boys and I had so very little and I was scared almost all the time about just being able to buy enough food and feeling like a failure for never being able to give the boys what they wanted. The boys were complaining about the things kids complain about, I pulled out an empty mason jar, some torn pieces of paper, and markers.  I told them this was our gratitude jar and we were going to fill it up with everything we were grateful for when we felt like we didn’t have enough.  The boys grumbled but eventually did it anyway. The practice lasted a few days and the jar filled up with torn pieces of paper quickly.  It has been sitting on a side table in my living room for years, untouched and yesterday I opened it up and began reading through the torn pieces of paper with the juvenile writing of my children and myself, something I had never done before so the boys would feel comfortable writing down whatever they were grateful for without inhibition.  As I read through one torn piece of paper after another, each piece was gratitude for the relationships, for me, for each other, for our family, and even for their dad.  Not one piece of paper was gratitude for a thing – not one single thing – every single piece was a thankfulness for a family member.

 

I realized reading through these pieces of paper that even through all the I-wants that I could never meet for them and the non-stop brother fighting, what they truly were thankful for as children were the relationships we had built in our crazy home.  They are all mostly grown now, with just my youngest still at home.  I have been grappling with the shift to having adult children, it went so fast.  Those many hard and challenging days I thought I couldn’t get through, gone like the fallen leaves, off to create new stories. And still today, what I find myself most grateful for as they sit around the table again, making a mess, and arguing over who took too much, negotiating the last taco shells left, and “accidentally” mentioning the things about each other a mom doesn’t need to know , is the laughter that is filling my home and the humans that I get to share this with.  We may never have had everything we wanted but we have always had all we need.