Elusive Equilibrium

Three runs down, one more to go before I give myself a much needed day of reprieve. I finished my long Week 6 run today, and surprisingly I found it easier than the Day 2 run I did yesterday with Big_Shoes. Something about stopping for three minutes in the middle really messed up my tempo, and Big_Shoes had to really push me to finish the second 10 minutes. Today, I ran 25 minutes (2.69 miles) by myself with no problem.

Part of the difference, I think, was that I just truly needed my run today. For myself. I woke up this morning to a pile of emails that included several from my boss. I had made an error on the website for work, and although it was a simple misunderstanding on my part, it apparently caused a lot of commotion. After reading the emails, realizing my mistake, and knowing there was nothing I could do from home on a Sunday, I felt a surge of panic. I have never been one to carry around a lot of anxiety, but since starting my Master's program (in a new city, 3,000 miles away) these little private moments of panic have seemed much more frequent. There are a lot of people putting their eggs in my basket. And then every so often it hits me that I have more on my plate than I can possibly accomplish and rather than just concentrating on checking one thing off my list at a time, like I would normally do, I just seem to become paralyzed with fear and guilt. These periods of stagnation - sometimes minutes, sometimes hours, sometimes days - only exasperate the problem. In the last couple of weeks, the side-affect of all of this (besides an ever-growing pile of things to do) has been the return of stress-induced headaches that I have always been prone to but have been under control for the past three years.

So you see, I really needed this run. Running didn't do the dishes, write my paper, fix the website, or get me back in my boss's good graces. but it did give me a chance to breathe. And dammit, that's important too, right? I find that I am constantly trying to find this mythical balance between who I am, who I want to be, and who I am supposed to be, but balance - like happiness - is not an achievement, it is a moment in time. And whatever is perfectly balanced, will always come unbalanced again. I just need to convince my inner self that that. is. okay. The world will not end if I let one ball drop. Or three. Or four.

Running is, by far, the most selfish thing that I do at this moment, and I really do believe that everyone should be truly, unabashedly selfish for at least a few minutes in every day. I used to paint, and I loved it. I could follow whatever whim I felt like following and I didn't have to end up at any predetermined outcome. It was purely and luxuriously selfish. But I have not had the space, time, or funds to paint in a long time. Running is the closest I have come to regaining my sense of self that I have when painting. The equilibrium that is so elusive in life is so easy to find out on that bike trail. For a few minutes, everything seems perfectly simple, and there is only one direction to go and only one way to get there. And even when I go home, and back to my fears and problems, even the chaos that is my inbox is somehow less intimidating, and I can suddenly handle not having everything under control. Of course, this too is only a moment in time, not a permanent, achieved state. All the more reason to go running again tomorrow.