February 8, 2009
Eustacia

I got to thinking about my last 12 months of life and realized I had missed one key thing throughout this year. Personal compassion and acceptance. I have spent much of the last 4 years of my life working on deepening my ability to be compassionate toward others yet this last year it seems I forgot it can also apply to myself.

In the last 12 months I have worked my dream job at the south pole, traveled abroad, fallen in love, become a parent, bought a house, lost my driving license, become extremely sick for 6 months, got a new puppy, lost my dream job and the ability to go to the place on earth where I am at complete peace, joined this fabulous organization thru all it’s changing, lost my ability to work out and attend my triathlons, been so sick I couldn’t spend time with friends, spent a lot of time with family due to an ailing grandmother, have the honor of being a pall bearer for my grandmother after she passed, started an EMT course, and continue to be unemployed going on 5 months now.

I think of all this and realize that the days I give myself a hard time for being fat and out of shape maybe I should take it a little easier on myself. That I have spent so much time being afraid that my sickness would become permanent I failed to see that there is such thing as temporary acceptance without the possibility of losing your core character. I was so afraid of becoming what I don’t want to be that I couldn’t accept what I was. And in turn that meant any attempts I made to remove myself from the situation I was in were not genuine and always met with defeat and hardship.

My spiritual beliefs are that we do the best we can in each and every moment with what we have available to us right then. I have super high standards for myself and at times I forget that some days conquering the world is not on my to-do list.

So today I did not conquer the world but I did work out for the first time in ten months. I jogged for only fifteen minutes at a slow 13min/mile pace. The first five minutes were like every run I ever embark on (even in excellent shape). Five grueling minutes wishing every second that I could throw myself in front of a moving bus. And then surprisingly I settled into a nice easy peaceful jog. Probably the most peaceful run I have ever been on.

It ended just as simply as it started though as I drove back home I felt like the luckiest person on earth. All of us on this team live every second of every day a little more complicated than the average person. We can’t take a sip of a drink or a bite of food or even a stride of a run without considering a multitude of factors. But the fact is, we can take that stride. And with any luck, I won’t forget that again.