THANKFUL FRIDAY

Team building

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I had to walk a tight rope this week. Not a figurative tight rope. An actual tight rope made of wire. It was two feet off the ground, but at this age, falling two feet could hurt. I didn’t do this completely unassisted. I had some support since it was a team building thing, but I will say that I did most of my tight rope walking with very minimal assistance. I really feel like if I had had some time on my own, just a few minutes really, I would have been dancing along that rope with zero assistance. It is quite possible that I could have a second career as a tight rope walker for a circus. I shouldn’t be surprised with this ability. I dominated the balance beam during my short gymnastics stint, but a wire is very different from a balance beam.

Wires move.

The wire vibrates and bounces with each step, even while attempting to stand still. The tension and strain from trying to hold yourself steady flows right down to the wire, which then begins to vibrate from side to side. You body turns rigid in effort to stop the wire from moving, but this causes the wire to move even more. At least, this was my experience. The harder I worked to get the wire to be still, the more the wire moved. The wire would only stop moving if I paused to take a moment to focus solely on my breath and release the tension from body. Balance is not rigid. It is fluid. You have to be able to sway and trust me when I tell you that this fluidity counter acts the movement of the wire. This doesn’t mean that muscles aren’t engaged and you are all loosey goosey. I could feel every single one of my core muscles tighten up to help me balance. I guess it’s more of dancer like movement and less of a hold it together by brut force kind of thing.

The physical act of wire walking is the most obvious metaphor for life.

It is so painstakingly obvious that I am kicking myself for all of the many many many times I tried to hold shit together by shear force. And I know this from my practice on my mat. I know that when I pause to focus on my breath, when I allow myself to sway and bend, everything that is supposed to fall into place, falls into place. That’s the key: Everything that is supposed to fall into place, falls into place. This means dropping any ideas of controlling everything to fall into place. Instead I need to focus on the things that I can control. Recently, I wrote up a list of reasons of why I am unhappy. It turned out to be a very short list. So I followed that list with a list of ways I could fix the unhappy list. What I realize about the things on the unhappy list is that they all consist of things that I can’t really control, like other people’s behavior. The solutions to those things are to control my reactions. Some of that means speaking up more and some of it means putting less effort into things. I have stopped trying so hard to make the wire stop vibrating.

This is what I’m thankful for today.

I WALK THE LINE

Open heart. #40daysofyoga

"Open heart. #40daysofyoga"

February. That's my month. That's the month where all the memories of the past come swirling around and crashing into each other. That's the month where I feel that frantic need to just hold it together, for the love of Pete, just keep everything "normal". I feel the panic I felt then, the panic that came with the realization that all of this was real and there was nothing I could do about it. Chris was going to die. That's it. Get used to it. Take the time you've got left, which is very little, and make the most of it. There was a panic in that too. Making the most of the time left. It was like having a to-do list with too many things to do. Overwhelming. February is overwhelming. 

I suppose I have gotten used to it. I've gotten used to him not being here any way. With the exceptions of things that remind me of him. I'm sure he'd have a lot to say about the remake of the Ghostbusters and the all female cast. I can't imagine his feelings about the new Star Wars movies. But it's little things like these that pop up and make me want to ask "hey...what do you think Chris?" Except he's not around to ask. This used to make me fall to pieces. Completely undo me. Now it's just an annoyance and this where the line comes in. It should be more than an annoyance, but how do I reconcile this without hurting the feelings of the one I'm with now. Hey, I love you, but I also love this other man that I used to be with. It's not like we fell out of love or decided that things were not working out between us. We were both still in love when he left. Well, that love just doesn't go away. I don't even wish that it would. 

It just seems unfair. On both sides. There was a day a couple of weeks ago when I was I really sick. I was laying on the couch staring glassy eyed at the TV, watching Blended. Adam Sandler's character was tucking his youngest daughter in to bed and she asked him when he was going to meet another girl. The little girl was so matter of fact and Adam chuckled about how that was what her mother talked about all the time. Who was he going to date when she died? And this is how I found myself ugly crying through an Adam Sandler movie. These are things we never discussed, probably because Chris figured it didn't need discussion. Well of course, you'll meet someone and move on. That's a given. I remember when Melissa met Richard and before we knew it they were engaged. I was shocked by how fast it all went down. Chris treated it as a non-issue. Time shmime. He said "life's unpredictable. why should she wait?" I agreed completely. Of course he was right. I was just "wow that's fast". Which is funny because my situation was fast. Life's unpredictable. 

I'm pretty sure if you looked back in the archives, I wrote this entry last year. I've got five stories and they just keep repeating in a loop. Just like dad. Except my stories don't include chicken fried steak. It's a common theme around these parts. It's just that I've gotten so good a this tight rope act. I can even do that trick where you balance the chair on the rope and then do a handstand in the chair. February is that inner ear infection that messes with my balance. It's that sudden gust of wind that catches the umbrella I'm dancing with causing me to windmill my arms around trying not to fall. February is my vertigo, making the rope seem higher than it actually is. February is an asshole.