Individuation

It really is time to turn in the old human race card when the idea of being unable to update your blog over a 3-day weekend actually makes you wish you were working on Monday. Maybe I'll just spam this thing all day today in an effort to get blogging out of my system.

Went for my second run of week 3 last night, and about a quarter of the way through it occurred to me that I was a walking example of a person who should have knocked wood while bragging yesterday, because it was a really hard run. I don’t think I’m a ‘5 minute warmup’ kind of gal – I think I’m more a 15-minute warmup type. It wasn’t until halfway through the run that I lost the dazed and sleepy feeling of running through sand and perked up a bit. Running is good for me that way, I think. I live most of my life in my head, and since I’m usually ruminating something I tend to walk through the world without noticing much. Running slams me back down into my physical body and into the presentness of the real world. And, like last night, the real world includes pain and sweat and exhaustion and the feeling that you’d really just like to stop and take a nap now, thankyouverymuch. So it’s good for me, and like all things that are good for me, I resent the hell out of it sometimes. *g*

I was reading an interesting article in a book on compulsive overeating the other day. For the moment my Wolf seems more like a big slobbery lab who ambles around the house and yard barking at the birds, but I know that under the docile presence lurks a monster, so I’m reading a lot about the subject in an effort to get to know myself better and shore myself up for the inevitable time when his fangs grow again. Anyway, the book talked about the lure of weight loss and health issues for people who need something “easy” to focus on. The author wasn’t trying to downplay the difficulty of losing weight, mind you, but she did point out that the truth is losing weight is a physiological result of some very basic behavior (fewer calories in, more out) and that for that reason it was a simple concep. Simpler, say, than focusing on a bad relationship, grief, depression, illness, uncertainty in the face of terrorism, etc all things that a single person often can often not do anything to heal or prevent. And she said that in that way weight loss gave a lot of folks a tentative hope that there was something in the world they could control. I am intrigued by that idea and have been thinking a lot about it. She also posed a great question: “if you woke up tomorrow without a weight or eating problem to deal with, what would you be forced to start focusing on?” I’ve carried that question around with me all week. What would I be forced to focus on? My relationship, and wondering whether it’s healthy or not in the long run; my writing and what a chronic lack of ambition says about me; whether or not I’m happy. Things I probably work hard subconsciously to avoid. I love reading things like that that make me think about myself in new ways. Call it dumb or trite, but it helps me prod the deep and tender parts of myself that don’t often see the light.

In other far less introspective news, I bought a heart rate monitor this morning. Not that I think there’s a ghost of a chance I’m running too fast (Hahaha!) but because I think it will serve me well in the long run. Also it makes me feel like a legit runner. And I’m all about feeling legit lately. You do what you can, you know?