Returning home from a sodden dog walk in teeming rain I pass a few joggers looking as miserable as the weather and feel happy in the certain knowledge that however good running might be for my physical body, I don’t want to do it.
In an age when we can’t move for unsolicited advice about what we ought to be doing to enrich body and mind it’s worth celebrating the certainty of dismissing that which holds no interest without guilt.
I’m describing this later on in our podcast to my friend Martin.
ME: “When we push out beyond stretch we end up in “panic” and then we have to make a decision. Do I really want to do this? If not, let go of it, but if I do I have to make it feel more manageable.”
HIM: “Give me an example.”
ME: “Well suppose I suggested that we try and cycle around the UK. The thought would probably throw both of us into a panic so if we really wanted to do it we’d have to break it down into manageable steps.”
HIM: “I can’t come. Someone stole my bike.”
In lockdown, I remember clients falling into two distinct camps, those who relished being relieved from the expectation to live more expansively than they’d like, and those who struggled to live a smaller life than the one they had become used to.
The former group found that Covid inadvertently helped them move from “panic” back into manageable “stretch”, and the latter from “stretch” into uncomfortable “comfort”.
When obliged to do things we feel unprepared for, rather than charting our own course, we often find that all we do is generate an excess of anxiety and stress which ends up self-defeating.
All of this is a roundabout way of explaining why I’m not going running.
Then, as if to summarise a week of mulling over the difference between choosing to do something and choosing not to a question arrives from a client who has moved into her first apartment away from family, friends and everything she knew.
She’s feeling exhausted, isolated and lonely.
That part between “panic” and finding your way back into “stretch” is a liminal space that can seem both interminable and unbearably destabilising.
Of course, she’s growing and that often hurts, but on the other side of the pain is something better.
As I’m replying to her, my son’s birthday cake is in front of me, the one I baked but can’t eat because I gave up sweets, chocolate, biscuits and cake for Lent in a moment of unnecessary “hair-shirtery”
It will have been his last birthday living at home because he’s moving out with his girlfriend in the summer.
He’s excited about it and I sense him making a reasonably seamless transition from “comfort”, where he has been for too long and where his ability to grow has atrophied, into the healthy “stretch” of the next chapter in his life.
I, on the other hand, am in “panic”.
I’m finding it hard to imagine not knowing when I’ll see him next or the degree to which life is about to change dramatically when he, and then later this year, my daughter, are both gone.
It’s beautiful of course, to see your children grow up and leave not least because it allows us as parents to think that maybe we got some things right if they’ve developed the ability to cope without us.
But the task of breaking down the idea of their absence so that it feels less like “panic” and more of a “stretch” into the later stages of my own life is something that I have no idea how to address at the moment.
Perhaps I’ll take up jogging.
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