Once again, up on time and behind the clock anyway. But these mornings are easy and light. Leonard is getting older now. He walks awkwardly behind me down the hallway at 4 and stretches one leg at a time. He takes his time in the yard while I make a cup of coffee. He gets a treat, too, and we sit in the living room and listen to the birds for a while.
Then yoga, writing, and a run. It’s an easy start to the days. I can land in my body after a night of dreaming. I can forget about what it looks like. What it “should” look like. I twist it, I breathe, and I move it over tree roots and around puddles. By the time I get to work, I have made peace with myself. I’ve let go of outside perspectives. It helps. If my left shoulder hurts, I don’t need to label it and try to shove it away from me in shame, or point at it in awkward self-deprecation.
It just is.
Facts: I have green eyes and gray hair, and these bones have been growing and mending themselves for 56 years. I am not going to be ashamed of surviving.
I have also cleared up my feelings about what the shrink calls the “crisis”. I’ve been able to sort through it all and put my finger on exactly what hurt me. For a lot of reasons, I can’t confront the woman who threw me under the bus (my Norwegian friends think this is a weird and violent metaphor), so I have to find a way to live with that. Maybe I can learn from this how to sort my feelings quickly and stand my ground in the future.
It is embarrassing that at my age I still find myself in the middle of a tantrum of “it’s not fair”. Letting go is difficult. I don’t know, maybe as much as anything else, my mother’s death has taught me the value of letting go of old hurts and old “that’s unfair”s.
It is what it is. Was what it was. Whatever.
The birds are still singing. And I am off for a run.
Hope you had a great run!
I used to have that feeling about throwing tantrums and saying “It’s not fair.” Still do sometimes. But I also had an epiphany along the way – saying something is unjust (and I’m thinking mainly about the injustices in people’s lives imposed by outside forces) takes away that emotional, tantrum edge and it becomes a fact. Life might be unfair in general, in emotional terms, but there is never a rational excuse for injustice, in my view. Saying something is unjust can’t just be batted away by politicians and other people in power. Injustice is a crime. Unfairness is just that – a breach of spirit, not a breach of the law.