Can’t go over it. Can’t go under it. Can’t go around it. Gotta’ go through it.
So I had decided to go take a walk today. I need the exercise and I probably also need to get out of the house. I must admit that this October the weather has been gorgeous and has been almost completely lost on me. It was going to be a four mile walk. I know this because it is two miles to walk to our office and I needed to pick up mail there.
I done thunked a lot of thoughts while I was walking and there was a tentative thread of a theme there that is meaningful to me. I am going to attempt to strengthen that fragility by verbalizing my thoughts. I’m not entirely sure how to do that yet. How to tie together all these random memories. I guess we’ll see how this turns out.
When I was little, it was just me and my mom. And boy howdy, did my mom know how to get things done. There was no one else. She didn’t have a large network of friends and family. There was just me–a skinny, bony child with no muscles. She and I did a lot of labor around our apartment/house. Not like we were construction workers or anything, but if something needed to be done, we did it. Looking back now I’m just amazed at the things my mom accomplished–the sheer amount of furniture that we loaded and unloaded into and from our car and hauled inside and moved around. Sometimes we could only move it inches at a time. But we got it done.
When I was first married, I prided myself in being able to do big, heavy jobs. Often rearranging furniture while the Hubba was not even there. Now, if I have a big job, I definitely ask my boys and my husband to do it. I just don’t want to anymore.
When we had four littlies, I remember talking to my sister-in-law about a difficult situation she was facing and the crazy scheduling and ridiculous running around she was having to do on a daily basis to survive. And there was no end in sight. I don’t know how she did it. That would have broken me. For her part, she was amazed at what I was doing. Which, at the time, was basically leaving my kids with a sitter for the day, driving 50 miles to another town to use the university library for a couple of hours so that I could finish researching and writing my thesis. Both of us, in our own circumstances, just kind of shrugged our shoulders. What we were doing wasn’t amazing. It just had to be done and this was how you did it. There weren’t any other options. But from the outside looking in, our circumstances looked really hard to each other.
I made it the two miles to the office easy peasy. But the way back is more uphill and after about 1/4 mile I was wishing I was done. I was really wishing I was done. I kept wanting to stop. But every time my body was like “I’m done” and really almost stopped against my will, my brain would be like “What are you going to do when you stop?” There was no place to sit. So was I just going to stand there on the side of the road like an idiot? How was stopping going to get me home any sooner? It wasn’t. So I just kept on walking.
And that reminded me of one time during my brief “running career” in 2012 or so, I had run three miles and just had these horrible blisters. The worst blisters I had ever gotten in my life. Every time I took a step it felt like I was stepping on soggy marshmallows. It hurt so bad. But I still had three miles to get home. I endured the blisters for maybe an entire mile before I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I finally took off my shoes which was a welcome relief as it gave my foot space without rubbing and cooled off my hot feet. And when I came to the little stream by the side of the road, I walked in the cold, wet grass for even further relief. I desperately wished that someone would drive by and see me or that I had my phone so I could call for a ride. But I was on my own. No complaining or sitting was going to do me anything. So I just kept on walking.
I met a couple in one of my childbirth classes while I was preparing to run my half marathon. They had trained for and done a half marathon as well. We were talking one day because I had used a running analogy in my childbirth class. And after class they were talking to me about training for their half. I mentioned that I had never done a “long run” and wasn’t quite sure I could pull that off. They said that they drove in separate cars and dropped one car off at a spot and locked the keys inside. Then they got in the one car and drove ten miles away and locked those keys in the car. So now the only way they could get home or do anything was to run to the other car. They couldn’t stop and call it quits in the middle. I thought it was genius.
And really, that’s something that I noticed about myself. When I was finally able to go for “longer” distances, I could easily do 3 miles. But I only did 4-5 miles once or twice. I just couldn’t consistently keep it up. UNTIL I decided to start running to my jazzercise class five miles away. Then suddenly, without much effort or training, I could just run 5 miles every day. Because I had to get there. What was I going to do at 8:15 in the morning at mile 3–go back home? Stop and sit? Call someone for a ride? No. I had to make it. There was no other option. And when I wanted to start cutting my time down, all I had to do was make sure I left later in the morning. Because the class started at 9am. If I wanted to be there on time, I was going to have to pick up the pace. So I did.
When I finally did run the half marathon I was really nervous. I never did do a longer training run than the five miles I was running 5 times a week. 13 miles is more than twice as long as that. My goal was just to FINISH the course before they closed it and started rounding people up. I ended up running something like 10 consecutive miles. How on earth was that even possible when the longest I had ever run before was half of that? And I only walked for 1.5 miles total. Well of course, it helped that the entire course was downhill. But still, what other option did I have? We were on a mountain. There was no one and nothing. I had no option but to keep running down that mountain. There was no food, no help, no rest any other place but the finish line. So I just had to get there. And running was the fastest way to accomplish that.
As I was walking, I was also thinking about yoga and how if I were still teaching childbirth classes, I would use a lot more yoga analogies. I would probably suggest that there is a lot to be learned about how childbirth works by doing yoga. So mentally I was pondering how far you could take a yoga analogy before it just didn’t work anymore. And I was thinking that achieving a natural childbirth often has a lot to do with not having any other options. I’ve always said in my classes that EVERYONE WILL HAVE A NATURAL CHILDBIRTH unless they actively decide not to. Because childbirth is always “natural” unless you choose to intervene. So if you do nothing, you will have a natural childbirth. (Not going in to what exactly “natural” means right now.) If there are no options, you will have an unmedicated birth. So to go back to a running analogy, if you are trying to run a marathon and there is someone driving along side of you in an air conditioned vehicle constantly telling you how long you have been running, how long you have to go, telling you look exhausted and maybe you should take a ride in this van for the next however many miles, it’s going to be really hard to get in your groove and just do this difficult thing. And in the end, if all you wanted to do was just get to the finish line, there’s no problem with using the vehicle. But if you wanted to run a marathon, getting in the car isn’t going to do it for you.
On the other hand, if you have someone running with you, setting a pace, telling you what an amazing job you’re doing and how strong you are and keeping you hydrated and supplying you with energy gel, well you stand a better chance of finishing that marathon. So in my experience, people who give themselves the option of medicalized birth often get exactly that because childbirth is hard and if the option is there to get around it, during one of the hard moments, you might choose not to go through it. And people who put themselves in a position of non-medical interference (birth centers or home, midwives, etc…) are more likely to achieve a natural birth just because in the end, the option to get an epidural or whatever just isn’t readily available.
It’s the same with cooking, too. The only reason we don’t eat out every night is because we are not independently wealthy. If we were, I would either do a different restaurant or order in every night or we might hire a chef. I’m not sure. But since those aren’t legitimate options, we have to cook a meal. Almost every night. There have been times when I have been a freaking miracle worker in my kitchen. Times when I have no idea what on earth I can possibly make to feed 8 to 10 people today. Many times I’m working with food storage food. And if there were an option to go out and buy a pizza instead, I would have totally done it. But instead, I had to dig deep and find a way to make that miracle.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with wanting to find an easier way or get out of doing something hard. That’s how we innovate. That’s what technology ultimately is. That’s how we went from the stone age to the bronze age to the iron age and into the digital age. Even Jesus Christ himself in Gethsemane found himself sore amazed at the difficulty of atoning for everyone and asked if there was another way. Can’t go over it. Can’t go over under it. Can’t go around it. Gotta go through it.
I don’t know what my point is or what conclusions to draw from this line of thinking. I guess sometimes things are just really hard. And the only way we would ever choose to endure them is simply because there is no other option. And I guess, secondarily, maybe there are goals we would like to achieve that we keep falling short of because when the going gets tough, we choose the other option. So how can we remove those options so that the only way forward is through it? Kind of like, dieters only fail because there is an abundance of forbidden food around them. If you were living in an actual famine, you wouldn’t “fail” to lose weight. So that’s an extreme example. But maybe more than anything else, we need to change our environment. So back to the whole weight loss example, I lost a lot of weight without even trying the summer we lived in Belgium because we didn’t have a car and I had to walk miles and miles just to go to the grocery store or to take the kids to the park. I wasn’t very sure how much money we actually or whether things were expensive or not and so we were just buying the simplest ingredients to basically make three healthy, simple well rounded meals that we ate repeatedly without much variation.
Anyway, when there are no other options but to go through something unpleasant or difficult or challenging, there’s no point complaining or stopping along the way. You might as well just keep walking and get to the end as fast as possible.
sparkling blue 