Square One Is Much Different The Second Time You Start There

I’m sure the heat didn’t help, but the results reminded me of how far I’ve fallen.

Saturday was the day. With my body all stretched out and my running shoes firmly attached to my feet, it was finally time to get back to running. After several sedentary months of working through various ailments I was ready to move again.

I didn’t move very far.

The course was a familiar one, a three mile loop around the neighborhood I’d been running for years. And while I knew running this loop in its entirety for the first time in months would be quite challenging, my months of inactivity were simply no match for my lofty expectations.

Sometimes the body reminds the mind who the boss is.

The run became more of short periods of running between long periods of walking. And I wasn’t happy about it. I’d not run in months, but I am a runner, and I should simply be able to run because that’s what runners do, right? I flashed back to when I first started running eight years ago. I remembered the struggle of simply running the distance between two telephone poles, and now here I am with years of road miles behind me and I’m back to Square One.

When I started running a few years back, I did so embracing a degree of patience. I knew starting Continue reading “Square One Is Much Different The Second Time You Start There” →

Embracing The Discomfort Of Commitment

“It’s like running from Boston to Dallas.”

Julie is a dedicated fitness and wellness professional, and as a personal trainer running has become important to her. She shared that this past week she set a personal record for miles run in a week. Annualized, that total would cover 1,768 miles, the distance from Boston to Dallas.

“That is crazy!”

I sense that people fully committed to meeting their goals encounter that word often. Crazy. Those who show up daily, driven, fueled by a vision others can’t see nor even understand, those with zero tolerance for excuses, those willing to hold themselves accountable for the commitments they have made, especially the ones they’ve made to themselves. Behavior like this is for the most part unordinary, dwelling outside the realm of what is considered “normal” which can then easily be categorized as crazy.

But it’s never labeled as such by others also honoring their own commitments. Because they know what personal commitment demands and they forge ahead anyway.

It’s never the easiest path.

Life give us a choice as to how we decide to live it. We can take what comes our way, or we can Continue reading “Embracing The Discomfort Of Commitment” →

Learning How To Love Each Other

I guess that makes me a killer?

A year ago I found myself wandering aimlessly on Main Street in Catskill, New York. It was a trip with some upstate friends I hadn’t seen in quite a while and we spent the day reconnecting in this village on the Hudson River. Main Street is home to a collection of funky little shops and restaurants, and it was in one of these funky little shops where I first saw her. I turned my head and there she was.

A bonsai tree.

I know nothing about bonsai trees, but this one just called me to it. I was immediately struck by its asymmetrical shape, sort of like an inverted Nike logo, as if its branches were silently flowing in the breeze. For just $35 I could take her home. In that moment I became a bonsai tree owner, envisioning myself as some sort of Zen master meticulously and intentionally caring for this little tree.

My Zen master vision not withstanding, a year later the vibrant and green bonsai tree I brought home with me is now brittle and brown. There is no life left in its branches and bark.

I thought I new how to take care of plants. How hard could it be? Water and sunshine, repeating as necessary. Apparently the needs of this bonsai tree were different than I assumed them to be. My indifference to its specific needs resulted in the demise of this beautiful tree.

I never made much effort to learn how to properly care for a bonsai tree. I didn’t think I needed to. I never asked specifically what I would need to do to keep this little tree vibrant and lush. Instead of seeking to understand what was needed from me in this relationship, I simply applied my assumptions as to what it would take to position this tree to thrive and grow.

My assumptions were wrong, and the bonsai is dead.

Had I bothered to do just a little bit of investigating as to what I would need to do to properly feed and care for this tree, the tree would still be alive. Continue reading “Learning How To Love Each Other” →

The Greater Risk Is Not Being Authentically You

Authenticity sounds simple, right? To be yourself, fearlessly. Yet at some point for most of us we learned our authentic self expression was actually something to be feared.

Authenticity comes with great risk, a risk that who we really are won’t be understood or accepted in our most-important relationships. The fear of such isolation often leads us to suppress many of the parts of us which make us so beautifully and authentically unique.

So, to provide a perceived sense of safety, we dim our light for those who can’t handle our brightness, for we fear being left alone in the darkness. Our fear of abandonment leads us to abandon our truest self, an increasingly high price to pay the longer we choose to do so.

Conformity makes everyone comfortable. Except us.

In time we will be pained realizing the greater risk is in not authentically expressing who we are. And Continue reading “The Greater Risk Is Not Being Authentically You” →

Self Compassion Looks Good On You

Mom told us the day was coming, the day we would all stand before our Creator and be held accountable for the way we lived our lives. Awaiting us all will be either a stairway to heaven or a highway to hell.

Judgment Day. The ultimate exit interview. “Heaven or hell? What will it be?”

Many of us need not stand before our Creator at the end of our lives in order to be judged.

We already do this. To ourself.

And we can make our life a living hell in the process.

In a world which can be quite cruel at times, we, too, can be just as cruel. To ourself. Because we know who we really are, don’t we? We know our flaws and shortcomings better than anyone, and no matter how well we may hide them from the rest of the world, we will never be able to hide them from ourself.

And there is so much to judge, isn’t there? Our appearance, our weight, what we haven’t accomplished, what we haven’t become, what we drive, where we live, what we earn, the expectations we’ve not lived up to, both our own or the expectations of others. There is always something we’re falling short of if we just look a little deeper.

We can become quite good at paving our own highway to inner hell.

Sometimes we find ourselves embracing habitual patterns of our own emotional self-destruction without ever knowing why we do so. Sometimes we do so because we’ve simply Continue reading “Self Compassion Looks Good On You” →

When There’s Nothing To Look Forward To

The future has always been a utopian distraction from the present. The future is where hopes and dreams and aspirations all reside, a perfect escape from the mundane nature of where we can find ourselves right now.

But what if there was nothing to look forward to?

Could I be at peace, at least for a moment, if all there was in my life was that which was already around me?

I’ve been a runner most of my life, running from what was towards what I wanted it to be, only to be consistently disappointed when I got there. Undeterred, I’d then find something else to run toward, convinced that this time would be different while intuitively knowing the disappointment would be waiting for me when I got there.

And it always was.

You can never outrun the present moment, no matter how good you are at running.

When we’re focused solely on the future we do so at the expense of the present. When our Continue reading “When There’s Nothing To Look Forward To” →

The Rest Of Your Life Is Going To Happen With You Or Without You

What am I going to do with all those wasted days of my life?

In my hands I hold the next 90 days of my life.

I wonder how many of them I’m going to waste?

For a few years now I’ve been using a Best Self three month planner. It’s been a great tool for me, an even greater tool for me when I remember to consistently use it. Setting up this planner requires some initial work as it is undated meaning I need to manually write in dates on each of the 90 pages. This process begins my relationship with each one of those dates I write on each pristine page. How I choose to show up for that relationship will impact the quality of my life.

In setting up the new planner I will also go back through the just-completed planner to transfer over any important information I may need going forward. My process also included revisiting each of the previous 90 days, reviewing day by day how I actually spent my time during the last three months.

I hate the blank pages.

Blank pages. Days of my life where intentions were replaced with whatever was going to happen that day. Days full of possibilities and opportunities I never bothered to fully show up for. It’s not as if the planner is very complicated to use. All it asks of me is to set three intentions for the day, three tasks I get to commit to and complete. Yet some blank pages remain at the end of those 90 days. Some days I didn’t show up. Continue reading “The Rest Of Your Life Is Going To Happen With You Or Without You” →

The Physics Of Disappointment

Perhaps you, too, have something in common with a tyrannical mythological king?

When you manage to anger the gods, they do manage to come up with some rather unusual punishments. Especially in Greek mythology. Especially if your name is Sisyphus.

Sisyphus was a tyrannical king whose misguided actions earned him an eternity of rolling an immense stone up a steep hill only to have the stone roll back down the hill as he got close to the top. And when it hit the bottom, once again he’d push that stone back up the hill until it rolled back down yet again. Yes, for eternity. Pushing the same rock up the same hill repeatedly, always with the same results. A rather cruel way to spend the remainder of forever.

I’ve had my share of pushing things up hills. Of pushing rocks up hills only to discover they were the wrong rocks being pushed up the wrong hills. Pushing, hoping that maybe this time the results would be different, that maybe if I simply got better at pushing the wrong situations, relationships, or needed outcomes up the hills of my life this time would finally yield the results I desired.

And they never did.

Expecting different results from doing the exact same thing never produces different results. The physics of disappointment. Yet how often do we continue to push and hope, forcing what shouldn’t be forced and sentencing ourself to a lifetime of our own self-induced futility in the process.

Often we know we are pushing the wrong rock up the wrong hill, but we continue to push because that’s all we’ve ever known to do. We accept and expect the struggle because it’s always been a struggle, as if some fate we’ve been made to carry as we navigate the challenges of life.

Sisyphus never controlled his fate. He was given the one stone to continuously push up that one mountain. Forever.

We, though, get to decide what we are willing to push and where we are willing to push it to. And while we may be habitually inclined to keep doing what we’ve always been doing, we simply don’t have to keep doing what habitually has never worked.

It doesn’t have to be a struggle.

Maybe it’s time to stop pushing those wrong stones up those wrong hills?

Photo by Valeriia Miller on Unsplash

Trauma, Healing, Compassion, & Empathy

Perhaps this would have changed everything?

Just a few right words spoken at the right time could have significantly shifted the direction of that life. Or those reassuring conversations which were vulnerably started yet were met with a defiant wall of silence, the desperately extended hand not grasped by one who could have pulled us to a space of emotional safety.

The seeds of our greatest possibility never watered, the weeds of our insecurities and fears never pulled.

As I sit here this early morning, I find I am reflecting upon some of the stories I’ve both witnessed and experienced, some deeply painful life trauma stories others have bravely entrusted me with and the painful ones I’ve lived through on my own.

Our deepest pains are personal and seldom understood by others. Or even our self. The screams are often silent, and we carry this heaviness alone, simply moving forward the best we can, sometimes in rather unhealthy ways as we try to numb a pain only we can feel. Trauma is alive and invisibly thriving within all of us at one level or another.

As I’ve worked with my own traumatic experiences I’ve come to respect their presence in my life. No longer do I attempt to minimize their impact upon me. No longer do I chastise myself for letting events and outcomes I did not control actually control me. The pain and its impact have yet to be fully worked through, and perhaps they may never be fully processed. But there is no longer anyone to blame, neither the ones who unknowingly inflicted a pain that would shape a lifetime, nor the recipient of the pain for letting it do so.

This is where my healing truly begins.

I often wondered what life would have been like had those few right words at the right time been Continue reading “Trauma, Healing, Compassion, & Empathy” →

Making Space For The Hurt

I bet Mother’s Day has always sucked for Shawn and Zig.

Shawn and Zig were two friends I grew up with in the neighborhood. Both lost their Moms when they were quite young. They were old enough to understand what had happened, yet not quite old enough to understand why it happened.

I don’t think they’ve ever understood why, even all these decades later.

Their pain was never something they brought up. They just carried it with them, silently, as they bravely tried to move on with their forever-changed young lives. Time simply doesn’t heal wounds of this magnitude. You just learn to deal with it, in your own way, in your own time.

To look at them both you’d never know of the heaviness that was weighing them down, their pain undetectable to the uninitiated. But that’s kind of how we deal with our pains, isn’t it? Silently. Isolated. Our burden, ours alone to carry.

While pain may be visibly undetectable, life has taught me that the vast majority of us silently carry our own degree of pain and hurt just below the surface. Life certainly is a contact sport and we all have our scars and bruises inherent with simply being alive.

Everybody hurts.

Yet, do we make space for the hurt?

You’d think with the commonality of pain we all share we’d all be a bit more understanding. Since we do Continue reading “Making Space For The Hurt” →

Peter Mis LivingHalfFull.com

Lessons From A Life Unfolding