Did you see that down there? Video evidence that I RAN! ME! RUNNING! Ok maybe it was more like jogging, but still. For someone who considers anything more than sitting to be exercise, it was quite an accomplishment. We don't have an accurate record of my time but it was somewhere around thirty-eight minutes. I took the first mile at a good pace, walked the second and jogged the third. Of course this was after my mini-mental-breakdown prior to the race over removing my sweatshirt and publicly displaying my tight running pants, but that's another story.
The past couple of weeks included other accomplishments as well. I reached my 50 pound weight loss, which left me only eight pounds from my goal. You didn't see any documentation of it here, however, because I didn't do a very good job of holding onto that loss. I was up 2.8 pounds by the next week. Technically if anyone ever asks I guess I can say "I lost fifty pounds" but especially now, after a particularly tasty Thanksgiving meal and a day of leftovers, I think I'm even further from that loss. I'll get it back, it's just gonna take some time.
More notably than letting go of pounds, recently I've been struggling with letting go of emotional baggage. The concept of "letting go" in general seems to be a struggle for most people. Some have a hard time parting with posessions, even old, unusable ones. Then there's the heartache of watching your children go off to their first day of pre-school, their first date, and the start of their college careers. But it's peculiar to me that it's so hard to let go of the negative things in our lives, the self-imposed emotional restraints that can hold us back from experiencing life to the fullest.
Maybe it's that we come to know and trust those inhibitions like old friends. We snuggle up to them because they're familiar and hide behind them because they feel so much bigger than ourselves. And the thought of stepping out from behind the mask reminds us that we're weak and vulnerable and suceptible to pain. But the catch 22 is that remaining in the shadow means we're hurting ourselves daily and keeping ourselves from reaching our fullest potential.
All of that to say that my growth is ongoing. I'm accepting that I'm a work in progress. At any moment of any given day I'm thankful, annoyed, depressed, excited, nervous, motivated...not to mention HUNGRY! I guess that means I'm human. Which puts me on the same playing field as everybody else.
11.26.2007
11.22.2007
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