wind and words and things: a loose collection of thoughts on my one word at the halfway point

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I'm training for a distant half-marathon, and the place where I run most often is a trail that runs straight along a riverbed to the ocean. It's usually breezy, often downright windy, the kind of wind that makes a roaring noise over the music from my headphones. And so I often find myself pushing against invisible resistance, running into the wind. 

Some days I feel it as a challenge and I smile a little, grit my teeth, and push a little harder. Some days it's almost too much and the dread rises and I cry out, Oh, God, will I always be running into the wind? Some days it is too damn much and I just cry. I cry because the way I have to claw against this unrelenting force on the trail feels like a physical manifestation of the near-constant feeling that I'm struggling mightily just to inch forward, or even to hold ground, in so many other areas in my life.  So many times I've sat hunched over on my couch without even the strength to ask, Oh, God, will I always be running into the wind?

* * *

My life is full of gaping wounds. I can see them now where I couldn't before. I go from pain to pain, some days. My heart is raw, and the pain far closer to the surface than it used to be. I feel haunted, by bad decisions and hurt I've caused and the hurts of the world and my own seemingly permanent ineptitude. I feel stalked by secrets, so that the thought of sharing them begins to seem less painful than the prospect of keeping them. 

I knew this was going to happen when I chose feeling as my One Word for 2011. Back in January, I wrote, 

I know that feeling is the key to all the things I want to do.  Even the terrifying feelings with huge horned claws, they’re the first steps to the joyful ones with balloons and confetti and cream-cheese-frosted cupcakes.  The first steps to the real, open life I want.

I'm dwelling with the huge horned claws, looking at them every day, because I want that real, open life. I'm letting myself be sad, angry, frustrated, grief-stricken, accepting that those are ok places to be, when before I would have glanced at them and then humped on with my pack. I am still afraid, but I'm walking through the dark valleys without closing my eyes, peering into the shadows, even, to bring their contents to light. And I'm learning to let go of secrets. Learning to find the balance between protecting the privateness that is my nature and dissolving the outer hardness I've let grow for too long.  You've seen some of that here, and you'll see more in the weeks to come. 

My progress is slow. It may take a long time, much longer than a year. Sometimes I have to learn things all over again. Sometimes I'm still paralyzed by fear. Sometimes I feel like I'm just stepping in place. Such is this life.

* * *

Earlier this year I started keeping a gratitude journal, inspired by Ann Voskamp and the many friends who are part of her 1000 Gifts community. I've kept the journal off and on, a too-little list of the things in my life, big and small, that I have to be grateful for. 

Recently, I came back to it after a long time away because I read on a blog somewhere (which I can no longer find--maybe one of you saw it too?) that it is impossible to hold onto anger or fear and gratitude at the same time.  That moments of true gratitude have a way of revealing those other things as mostly irrelevant, and that looking for things to be grateful for can ease the hardness of life.  And so I began again in the journal, adding to my list a few things one day, a handful the next, as they came to me. The third day, I woke up with a song in my heart, all joy.  It wasn't my circumstances that had changed; it was me. Life was delicious.

Yesterday when I went running, it was windy, but I didn't want to cry. I didn't worry about how it would affect my time, or how I'd never hit my target distances. Instead, I remembered: that sometimes the wind is at my back, and sometimes it works to diffuse the heat the sun would pour down on me, and sometimes the victory is in the keeping moving or even holding ground, no matter how the wind blows. So I put my head down, and I imagined the brim of my hat slicing into the wind, and I ran.

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This post is my OneWord halfway mile marker. Read more on my One Word.  Meet Alece and learn about the OneWord2011 project. Catch up with the community.