This morning seems like yesterday. And I don’t know where the hours have gone. It’s like time is a huge monster with deep pockets who swipes things from me as he passes through. Enthusiasm. Motivation. The ends of sentences.

Wouldn’t it be lovely to tackle him and empty those pockets? I wonder if there is a cave somewhere brimming with shiny riddles?

It rained just a little at the end of this morning’s run. Fat drops from a white sky. But the sun is out now. Leonard is stretched on the rug next to me. Snoring. And I have a cup of tea, an empty head, and aching achilles tendons. It feels good to be getting out the door again in the mornings, but my body has fallen apart in some places, tightened in others. It will probably be another week before my achilles can handle the four kilometers without complaining.

Push through. That is what I keep telling myself. But most days it feels like I can only push through one thing a day. It takes all my energy. I don’t remember the last day when I hit everything on a to-do list and sat back in the evening feeling… I was going to write productive, but that isn’t the word I really want: feeling capable.

I joked yesterday with E. that I want to move back into my 55 square meter apartment so I can’t escape the laundry that needs folding. Out of sight out of mind. What happened to my discipline? Do I need to go that far back in time to recreate the conditions in which to find it?

I have friends who used to tell me I was neurotic about my self-discipline. That to cut out yoga one morning wouldn’t be the end of the world. That I was too strict with myself. But you never know what the linchpin is in an ordered life.

And trying to put things back together, you never can guess what the stable center pillar will be. If I try to pull all of the elements together that defined my life 14 months ago, I will probably wind up crushed under the weight of it all. So I am trying to upright one thing at a time. Figuring out what has fallen apart and needs to be tightened, and what has tightened and needs to be stretched.

It’s slow going, this sorting. And it is okay.

only mallards now
iridescent in the reeds
nature’s sleight of hand