Things I Learned about Life from Running

Red-faced and proud of it

Exercise comes as easily to me as breathing underwater. I hate, hate, hate it. But I have to admit it feels pretty good to make myself do it anyway and feel my body change in response. Here are some of the things I've learned over the past six weeks. I figure they apply to pretty much anything we undertake in life.

1.      It ain’t pretty but do it anyway

2.      You really have to want it

3.      Give yourself enough time to warm up and cool down

4.      Don’t be afraid to go at your own pace

5.      If you’re in significant pain, stop and get help

6.      Good food and good sleep are required for success in anything

7.      Don’t let yourself off the hook too often or you’ll lose your motivation

8.      Push yourself just a little more each day

9.      When you feel like you’re at the end of your strength, pray!

Chasing Rainbows

'I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty;
I woke, and found that life was duty.
Was thy dream then a shadowy lie?
Toil on, sad heart, courageously,
And thou shall find thy dream to be
A noonday light and truth to thee.'

        - Louisa May Alcott

I have returned to the Cottage after a two-year hiatus. I feel a great need to step back from the world of professional self-promotion and just be me. Not the writer me, just the Christine me. I think I may be going through a midlife crisis. I find that writing about young, cool, attractive people is depressing at this stage of my life. I never felt terribly cool or attractive even when I was young, and now…. well… let’s say I haven’t mastered the “Midlife Charm” well yet. (a la Harry Potter).

It is difficult to face the reality of what your life is and realize what it might have been. When you are young you have all these big dreams. The promise of “potential.” My word, how much is made of our potential! I had a lot of it, I realize. Good brains, good education, good upbringing. Talent, so they said.

Creative types have the hardest lot, I think. We see the world in such rainbow prisms of possibility. The daily toil hits us hard. Sometimes I feel I need to stop looking at rainbows so much and worry about weeding my lawn. Then I see how many, many weeds there are and how they are entangling me. Even choking me with their pollen.

I’m sorry to be so blue. Blame Monday and this horrible, stifling, suffocating heat that steals the very breath from our souls. I’d rather have snow!

What do you do when you feel like the rainbows are nothing but vapor?