jog, jog, jog

Today I read about having a mantra while you run.  Haruki Murakami used I am not a human.  I'm a piece of machinery.  I don't need to feel a thing.  Just forge on ahead.  Granted, he was running a 62 mile ultramarathon at the time, while I was only attempting to run three miles today, but I tried it out anyway.

I've had a weird exercise month.  I'm in a show which takes more energy out of me than I think I'm used to admitting and I'm trying to go easy on my knees.  Last week I wanted to run four times.  Instead I ran twice and biked once.  I'm always very motivated at the beginning of the week.  Not so much at the end.  Granted, weekends are when the show is, so I'm very busy, but still.

Anyway, I've been running two miles only for awhile.  It seems like a long time, but it's probably only been a couple of months.  I didn't have an ipod today, which means I am more likely to overly fixate on my breathing and start to wonder how on earth I am ever supposed to do this.  So, today I paused between mile two and three and tried to get my head into a better place.  I thought, it's a mile, just a mile, what's a mile? just a mile.   and I started running.  Pretty soon my mantra morphed into multiple variations of the above and and i jog, jog, jog and i jog, jog, jog.  This got mixed in with strong legs, strong arms, strong head, strong heart!  i am strong, strong, strong and i jog, jog, jog.


It was strangely effective.  And I ran that mile.

Real Life

I just finished re-reading Anne Lamott's "Grace (Eventually)" and liked it again.  Truth be told, I'm not in a very Anne Lamott kind of place right now.  But I was thinking about my marriage today and the little everyday moments that move us along and I was reminded of something she wrote,

I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kinds of things; also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace's arrival.  But no, it's clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in the silence, in the dark.

She was relating this to the story of her son Sam moving inch by inch in a sleeping bag, over weeks, down the hall from her room to his new room in their new house.

scootch, scootch, stall; scootch, stall, catastrophic reversal; bog, bog, scootch.

I feel this is appropriate.  People don't learn to live together instantly.  Every intimate relationship takes thousands of moments, thousands of choices and hundreds of arguments and conversations and exasperated sighs to develop.  I don't wake up knowing how to best love Peter on any given day.  He doesn't love me perfectly from the second I step foot in the door at night until the instant I fall asleep.  We don't make decisions smoothly or incorporate each other into our processes very graciously.  But we do scootch along.  We get bogged down; we stall, but we're moving.  Slowly but surely, we're inching down the hall.