A Moment's Pause
(Excuse the slight stream of consciousness this week, the first flush of grey and cold does it to me every year.)
Most weeks that I sit down to write this Substack, my opening thought is, “So, what of it, then?” The intention here is not just to document things for the sake of it, it’s not necessarily a journal in that way, but I hope to dig a little into what has passed and transpired. I’ll usually have had a recurring thought or feeling, a single moment in a conversation that kicked off a series of thoughts, and my task here is to ask myself: so, what of it?
This week, the question feels much broader. Some weeks it does. It feels more existential, less probing, more sitting back with a coffee and a brownie with a fresh haircut and having a moment’s pause, outside of a whole host of things, the rushed cycle to work, psyching myself up to run some intervals (5x4 minutes), missing the sun, anxious about which of my many half-read books I should be reading, anxious about the Gaza peace deal, listening with interest to a piece on the radio about fungal nail infections - isn’t Radio 4 just fantastic? - and learning that apparently 1 in 3 people have athlete’s foot and don’t realise, and as is the way with too many things, many, many things, the treatment that costs over £20 will do nothing for you.
I’m having a moment’s pause from the grief of having lost two things that were precious to me in quick succession. From being anxious about a third thing, because as mum says, things always come in threes. This is soothing to know when you’re on the third thing, as a child I could be reassured that there would be no more, but now when two things happen, I’m slightly on edge. (Mum, can we change it to “things come in no more than threes”?)
A moment’s relief from a strange ache in my neck. From cycling so much over the past week? Oh, I really must sort out the squeak in the breaks on my front tyre. I hoped the noise would help alert a blind man with a stick to my presence as I slowed to a complete stop on the shared use path the other day, but I handled the whole thing terribly and his stick collided with me and my bike. It didn’t occur to me to use words, to use my voice, and anyway the road is so loud and I am so quiet, was never a loud singer, sound technicians in theatres would yell at me because the mic gain was as high as it would go, I would just have to be louder to be heard. Is it because I have good hearing? I hear myself loudly so I speak quieter? I see far and I hear well. I sometimes wonder at who I would have been in a tribe. Oh, this world of sitting at computers, it does not make the best of so many of us. To be in the tribe, running far, thriving, but I worry about the fact I am alway hungry. I sometimes wake up hungry in the night and have to go downstairs to the kitchen by torchlights to drink a small cup of milk to stop the ache in my tummy. I will run to hunt more meat for the tribe, I will see and hear the animal from afar, but please allow me an extra portion of food.
Last week I had a bit of a health kick - no booze, no chips, no crisps, no pastries, lots of meditation and breathing, solid early nights, good whole-food dinners and lots of patience and care for myself and my home. I was successful for the most part (Hula Hoops) and it was superb, I slept really well. But it took a lot of energy, I needed those early nights to recover from a day of clawing my thoughts and feelings back to equilibrium, analysing impulses and exploring better responses. For me, the easiest response to someone’s anger is to blame myself. It was exhausting to breathe deep, try not to be so porous, and reassure myself that the outburst was nothing to do with me. I see that this whole process will be a long term one.
So here I am, I’ve finished my coffee and my brownie, and am having my moment’s pause. What of it, then?
I’ve started a training schedule to try and get some of my running speed back over the next 10 weeks. It will take me right up to Christmas so it seems that Christmas Day Parkrun really has become my A race of the year. I never for a second imagined I could achieve my goals in anything less than 10 weeks, and I know that this block of training is a paragraph in a long story, so why did I imagine I could even begin to reset decades of patterns of thought in a week? It’s the time we give to recovery that is crucial to accruing gains from the work. It takes time. It is moments of pause.
So, what of it then?
Nothing at all. Everything, all of this, yes.
Hither and thither and heretofore and whereafter. Tiny ghost-grey mushrooms growing in the centre of the trail, do I tell the man and his dog, do I tell them to mind out? How long before their perfect cones are trampled? I will see, in time, all in good time. I would have taken a photo to preserve them, if only I had my phone.
I enjoyed, and can relate to quite a lot of this, but I particularly liked the straight-from-the-brain fourth paragraph, "A moment's relief [...] food." It works so well. Happy training! :-)