All These Places

I woke up wondering what I was going to write about today.  My thoughts spun, as they sometimes tend to do, down a spiral.  I thought that maybe I should just give up this blog thing.  Because how was I going to come up with something day after day after day.

                Luckily, I know what to do when I’m feeling like that.  I go for a run.  It’s always been the surefire way for me to clear the cobwebs.  When I return from a run, breathing hard and sweat sealing the clothes to my body, I feel like I’ve gained insight over the miles.  It’s like magic—though I haven’t necessarily focused on the issue that was plaguing me when I left the door, I feel better about it when I return.

                Today is a strange winter day.  After a few days of cold and snow, the temperature has jumped up and the dark clouds in the sky now speak of rain.  The wind is so strong that it’s redistributing neighbors’ trash cans, blowing them across streets and alleys.  After running for about a block, I started to talk myself out of any kind of distance, thinking maybe I’d just run a mile and return home.

                But instead I kept going, knowing I’d feel better if I did.  At one point, in a display of nature’s playfulness, the sun came out at the same time that the rain started pouring down.  I finished a loop through some neighborhoods and came back to the park and glanced at my left at the menacing hill that climbed by the tennis courts, up to the back of the park.  I really didn’t want to run hills but for the same reason that I decided to run more than just a mile, I turned to my left and took a deep breath.

 Running is full of analogies about life—putting one foot in front of the other, keeping a steady pace so you won’t burn out too quick, etc.  But my favorite analogy comes from a book called “The Other Shulman.”  Shulman is a slightly overweight middle aged man training for his first marathon and his coach is a man named Jeffrey.

                Jeffrey says this about hills to Shulman:  “They break up the monotony of the flat.  But like any other challenge, you have to accept and learn to live with them.  And then they’ll make you stronger.”

                And so this is why today I head up that hill though everything in my body screams against doing so.  I do it to remind myself that challenges are meant to be overcome and that writing this blog, like running in the rain, isn’t an easy thing to do, yet I will do it anyway.  Because I’m trying to learn to love the hills.