Run.

I'd forgotten how much I like running a 5K. I like the people cheering me on and the strength of the morning sun against the chill of the air and the sweat of it, the hills and the go go go.  This was the first race I've run in years, and so it was the first race in which my family stood at the finish line to cheer me on- and I liked that, too.

Most of all. I like accomplishing something in an arena in which I cannot, and do not, want to compete at any kind of legitimate level.  I made it over the finish line in under 33 minutes! Which is pretty slow!  And I was incredibly proud. 

September 29: Hair

Petty loss edition.

I love my hair color.  It's a variegated chestnut with hints of red, the kind of hair other people coax from the bottle.  But in just a few short years, I'll start to go gray, and a few years after that, bald.  And I'm acutely aware of all the years I wasted wishing my hair were not my hair.

I'm dwelling on this to escape the other, far greater losses barreling down the track.

September 18: Discomfort

Why wouldn't you try to sing the hymns? 

September 15: 3/4 of the year gone.

The older I get, the more I understand broken-heartedness to be the human condition.

To be alive is to endure heartbreak after heartbreak, some petty, some bone-deep, some clean, some shattering.  We are heartbroken by what we have done and by what we have left undone.  We break and are broken in turn.

I will never ski. 
The father I knew is gone. 
My son is growing up. 
There are no more rotary telephones. 

If I have broken your heart, I am sorry; you have probably broken mine. 

August 25: Pond

Sometimes a moment will open itself so vigorously, so incessantly and insistently, that for each of its sixty seconds you're both transfixed and engulfed, pinned inside: water, sun, water, wind, water, dirt, breath.

August 22: 35

There is something frightening about slithering down this slope of the demographic fulcrum.   Within the next ten years, if my family history foretells mine, I need to accomplish any work I want to get done that requires me to fire on all, or most, of my cylinders.  That I may choose to fritter those years away scrolling through Facebook, or fretting over my dirty countertops, or pushing work down the road until I have more time...

well, that's horrifying.  And that's life.  We waste our time: expertly, profligately, unceasingly. The wonder is when we don't. 

August 13: Dawn

Dawn is skulking in this morning, rain-flecked, dank, sun tucked up to its belly. 

I'm up for no reason.

Untrue: I'm up so I can be alone in the house to shuffle through my breakfast liturgy.  Paper, grape nuts, tea.  Holy, holy, holy. 

And I'm up so I can read.  It's Proust, this morning.  Out of pique.

Or wistfulness, or daring, affectation, curiosity, self-loathing.   Fortunately Proust is commodious.  I like that about him- the way each moment expands to accommodate galaxies, handbags, monsters, whole mornings in their cauls.