Mile Markers

It’s the 9th day of the month again. Today marks eleven months since Kurt died. Although grief is no longer at the forefront of my thoughts every day, I still feel sad as each of these small anniversaries approaches. This one seems especially poignant because the next one will be a full year.

At this time last year, I was packing up our things and preparing to drive Kurt and our three cats home from Palm Springs where we’d spent the late winter and early spring. Although he’d been under continuing care (read: “endless chemotherapy”) from a local oncologist, he was clearly getting sicker and weaker. He told me when we locked up the condo and left on May 15 that he didn’t think he’d ever see it again. I said, “Of course you will!” I was trying to be strong and I so badly wanted him to be strong and keep fighting. Perhaps, instead, I should have encouraged him to talk about it, at that moment when he might have still been able to have such a discussion with me.

No, I won’t second-guess my own actions from that time. We all do what seems like the right thing to do at the time.

And the mile markers go by, one after another.

My favorite running place, the Olympic Discovery Trail, has both mile markers and half-mile markers. I don’t look at them much these days, but they do serve as reminders to glance at my watch. I keep getting faster. I’m still not quite sure why I’m getting faster, or how much faster this slow happy runner is capable of going.

Since I started running three and a half years ago I’ve now run 1,577 miles, which is 534 more than last year at this time. I’ve probably run a million steps, give or take a few thousand, over the past year. One step at a time.

I have handled hills, rain, and gale-force headwinds. I can go out now and run ten miles at a constant pace that I couldn’t have done for even one mile a year ago. The next day I’m not sore. I’m amazed that I can just go and do a run like that and feel perfectly normal afterward.

Life goes on. I am not the person that I was a year ago. I will always have “Kurt’s widow” as a deep part of who I am, but I am not only that person. Every step, every mile, every corner turned and bridge crossed, takes me further beyond the life we shared.

My last post was about a bridge on the Olympic Discovery Trail, and it brought a question about whether this was an old railroad bridge. That particular bridge is a new one, but the trail is indeed on an old rail right-of-way, and some of its many bridges are indeed railroad bridges. After my run the other day I stopped to take photos of one of these; it’s just west of mile marker 5. Colleen, this is for you:

While on a bike ride back on April 27 I stopped in the middle of the bridge to look down at the stream. There was a bunch of wood and other debris caught in an eddy current and in the process of getting hung up on the downstream side of the bridge. I watched for a long time as a discarded green plastic bottle swirled around, each time looking like it might escape and float downstream, and each time becoming more entrapped by the debris. Each time I have crossed the bridge since that day, I have stopped to look for the bottle. Each time, it was still there.

Today the bottle was gone. There was still a debris dam there, but the green bottle had somehow escaped and floated on downstream toward the mouth of the stream a mile away.

Time passes. Things change. Mile markers approach and then fade behind us.

Life goes on, one step at a time.

The In-Between

I’m in the middle of packing and shipping some things, discarding other things, and mentally preparing myself to leave many things behind. Not surprisingly I suppose, in the middle of trying to do all this I got sick with a weird left-side-only ear/throat infection. It may have a physical cause (last Saturday I went hiking in a cold wind with periodic hard rain showers and I do recall having rain driven into my left ear), or it may be entirely due to the psychological stress of leaving this place and this part of my life behind me.

My physical surroundings are in total disarray. Yesterday I took 200 pounds worth of “stuff” to UPS and shipped it home. I’ve done a dump run, and this afternoon I’ll do a Goodwill run. Then I’ll have to figure out how to fit the artwork, electronic gadgets, and things needed en route into my car. My cats, that stuff, and I will hit the road within the next few days, leaving an unsold, mostly furnished condo behind. I’ll probably do another price reduction soon, and then cross my fingers that someone will want it furnished so I won’t have to come back later to dispose of the rest of the stuff. When I go, I want to be gone for good.

As far back as I can remember, leaving a place has been a gut-wrenching experience for me. Even leaving a place that I don’t want to be can be difficult. My choice to do a dissertation about the experience of being in a place was not an idle one; this was something deep that I really needed to understand about myself. Why do I get so attached to places? Why is it so hard for me to go? Why is it that, once I have left, I can hardly bear ever to return?

Once about ten years ago I had the opportunity to move back into a house that I’d loved very much but had had to leave about five years earlier. As much as I had loved that house and that town, I could not go back there. Partly that was because I didn’t want to be the person who’d lived there then, but mostly it was because leaving there had broken my heart and I didn’t want to risk having to go through it all again the next time. It was a house perched a mile high on the edge of a mountain range, overlooking a large portion of southern California. I looked down on millions of people, houses, cars, and lights. On a clear day I could see the ocean. I left it because keeping my job required it. I could no longer do the commute, which was 96 miles each way.

I am leaving this condo because I don’t need it; it is superfluous; it is holding me back. And yet I know what it meant to Kurt, and I know that he truly hoped I would keep it and live the life that he had wanted us to live. So this is me saying goodbye to something more complex and subtle than just another place.

I have other places to go…

It is time for me to say goodbye to this place.

Yet as I’ve said here a few times, this place does have its charms. Want another example? I took this photo the day I tried to go hiking in Joshua Tree National Park.

This was the day after the hike in the cold wind and rain, and hours before I realized I was getting sick. Although I’d expected to see snow and dressed accordingly, I wasn’t prepared for how cold blowing snow can feel when you’ve been in warm sunshine for the past few months. I was out of my car only long enough to take several photos.

It’s been a couple of weeks now since I’ve run, but right now I barely have the energy to walk, so I’m not worrying about not running. I expect to get right back on a regular schedule when I get home.

Right now, I am living in the in-between… but soon… I will be home.

Work in process

Perhaps I should mention that I have not dropped off the face of the earth. I’ve simply gone into another one of my thought-funks, in which a lot of things are brewing but it’s difficult (or premature) to crystallize them into the pseudo-solid field of Zeros and Ones.

I am angry. I am disillusioned, in the literal sense of having my sense of reality ripped open and exposed before my eyes. I have lifted the veil, looked behind the curtain… and there really is nothing back there. This isn’t that sense of “walking off the cliff” into unexpected depths of grief that I’ve written about here many times. This really isn’t about grieving for Kurt at all. This is more a sense that many of the fundamental assumptions I have held about the way the world works have simply exploded.

We live in a world in which the institutions we have created do not do well by the people who created them and who have devoted their lives to maintaining, sustaining, and striving to improve them.

For many years I have lived, or professed to live, by this well-known Gandhi quote: “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.” I devoted my professional life to trying to awaken others to the power of personal transformation. I honestly thought that if I could reach enough individuals with this message, then I could help make a genuine difference in the world.

I’m now seeing that the world (or at least the portion of the world in which I have lived my life) is not going to change, is not interested in changing, and would prefer to see the notion of “personal transformation” limited to “becoming more effective/productive within the constraints of the existing system.”

If I really, personally, want to see change in the world — MY world — I’m going to have to really, personally, start with myself. I have to reevaluate my relationships to the “stuff” that I love, the things that I believe to be true, the literal and metaphorical security systems and barriers against the world that I have personally erected. I have to dare to be free, and I have to take personal responsibility for what it means to be free.

So now I’m in the process of figuring out what all that might mean. I suppose I overthink things, but that is who I am and expect I always will be, no matter how many veils I end up piercing along the way.

As I figure things out (or not) I may be absent from this blog for a while.

Or I may have another great run and want to tell you all about it.

I did 4.4 joyful miles Monday morning, and 3.25 not-so-joyful miles this morning. I was having trouble being in the moment and running when all around me the known world was collapsing, and I’d only had 4 hours of sleep last night. If it had been a race I would have risen to the occasion, but this morning it was just a slog. So I’ll try again on Friday — and I do always look forward to my Friday runs as they herald the coming of the weekend.

A friend of a friend died of lung cancer this morning. My wounds are still too fresh; this news ripped my heart open again. This was not the source of my current anger and disillusionment; rather, those experiences left me wide open to the pain. If you smoke, please stop. If you truly love someone who is a smoker, please nag them to stop. Life is too short and precious to waste in such a stupid, senseless way. All we have are moments, and I want all of us to live as many moments as possible.

Learning, Harmony, Wholeness

It’s been an eventful 24 hours in my life, the details of which I’m not yet ready to share. Yesterday’s post was an initial attempt to figure out what things might be worth investing my time in doing, during the so-called “second half” of my life. Wouldn’t it be great to have another 56 years in this beautiful world? Well, I’ve learned to appreciate the power of “big hairy audacious goals” (BHAGs), so why not dream such dreams?

One of the comments on my last post (thanks, Patty) led me to revisit my personal purpose statement. My earliest attempt to put this down in writing (or at least, the earliest version that I still have on my current computer) dates to the year 2000. The last time I revised this statement was 2005 — but in re-reading it just now, I’m not sure I would change a word. All I need to do now is simply to move toward fully living it.

Three core values lie at the core of my personal purpose statement. All the rest of it is just details.

In my professional role as a leadership educator and coach, I have often led others through a values clarification exercise in which people sorted and prioritized a list of potential values including things like “achievement,” ”spirituality,” and “wealth” — the whole gamut of a hundred or so things that my work colleague and I could imagine that someone might hold dear — and winnow the list down to just three. The key feature of this exercise is that the person has to not only choose three core values, but also must define exactly what they mean to him or her. The next step, then, would be to write a life goal statement or high-level “mission” incorporating those core values.

Every time I have tried to do this exercise for myself, I identify the same three values, so I think I have the right ones, the values that truly resonate with me and help me to stay true to myself in whatever circumstances and decision points I may face.

So… here they are:

Learning:    continuous, lifelong growth of knowledge, awareness, wisdom, and creative action

Harmony:    living at peace, in beauty, in balance, and at home in the world and in myself, in action and in stillness

Wholeness: absolute commitment to a whole life truthfully lived in creative relationships with an interconnected world.

 That’s it; that’s me; that’s what I’m here to do. The really cool thing is, everything I wrote yesterday aligns perfectly with these core values. In the process of doing whatever I might do in the future, I hope to make the world a better place in whatever small ways I may be able to make a difference. As I continue on whatever paths I may decide to follow, I’m going to keep doing, showing, living, and being those values.

It’s a great feeling to come home to and re-embrace one’s deepest values. Everything is going to be all right.

Oh yeah, all that and another PR at the Palm Springs half marathon in just a few weeks from now. 

If I had all the time I needed…

How would I invest my time?

This is a question that is starting to arise in me. At the center of this whole idea of “life goes on,” “creating a new life,” “finding my way one step at a time,” and all those things I’ve been writing about (when you thought you had signed up for a blog about grief, or running, or whatever brought you here), there is a deeper question that is starting to emerge.

What do I really want to do with my life?

What adventures are waiting for me, things that I have not yet done, been prevented from doing, been forced to postpone? What dreams are still boxed up gathering dust on some shelf somewhere that I meant to get back to but could never find the time? Are any of them still worth pursuing? Or what new dreams (and realities) might unfold if I could clear away all of the dust that surrounds my present life?

Well, I think I have at least two books waiting to be written. There is a book that will come out of my dissertation research and all the thinking I have done since then about the experience of being in a place. There is a book about what it’s really like to be a caregiver for a terminally ill loved one (and I have a wealth of data from my blogs to draw upon for that one). Maybe there is even a book about running and/or blogging one’s way toward a new life. So if I suddenly found myself with an endlessly blank calendar, the first thing I would do is block out a few hours a day for some serious writing.

No, wait! The first thing I’d do is block out at least eight hours a night for sleeping. I’ve lived on 4-6 hours of sleep a night for so long, I can’t even imagine how much energy I might have if I ever got caught up on sleep. My natural body clock would love to go to bed about 2:00 AM and get out of bed around 10:00 AM. So the writing would be #2 on my to-do list, after staying up as late as I want and sleeping in as late as I want.

What else? I’d get more exercise. I’d walk or hike or bike on the days when I don’t run. I would drive less. I would spend more time among mountains, beaches, forests, and other wild places.

I’d get more serious about gardening. As a vegetarian, I’m curious to learn how much of my own food I could actually grow, given time to devote to it. I’ll never be able to eat completely locally in Washington state (I love lemons too much!), but my bioregion is amazingly diverse in terms of what can be grown. I’d like to learn how to make growing things thrive, and I can see myself teaching (or at least inspiring) others to make growing things thrive.

I’d make more friends. I’d get involved in local community-building and volunteer activiities. I’d dabble in art, music, and/or theatre. I have no idea where my beyond-writing muse(s) might lurk, but I want to try things. I see a local arts scene beginning to grow in my remote small town, and I think we have a shared interest in nurturing this growth.

I would take a whole bunch of photographs of the meeting of earth and sky, and of the way light pervades and transforms spaces.

I would spend money more intentionally, and I would recycle/resuse more carefully. While I may always be a gadget geek, there are no rules that say I have to hold onto every single obsolete, unused gadget… or collectible object or keepsake for that matter. I would get rid of a lot of stuff and create more space in my life for experiences.

I would live as consciously as possible in the moment, in each moment, because I know that the number of our moments is finite.

I would laugh more. I would play more. I would hope to love again. I would have fun.

Looking back at what I have just written, I wonder… what am I waiting for?

What about you? If you had “all the the time you needed” (along with the awareness that your time is, in fact, precious and finite), how would you invest your time?

Right here, right now

I’ve been very busy the past several days, trying to meet short-term work deadlines and making other preparations for a few days of the luxury that I am now experiencing… a gift to myself of time, space, and the company of a community that is very dear to me.

I’m in a California coastal city for an annual gathering of students and faculty at the university where I did my PhD. Coming back here as an alumna, I don’t have to attend seminars or dissertation committee meetings. I can drink in the energy around me without absorbing any of the stress. This is one of the few places where I can talk about Dasein without getting blank stares in return. I spent some time in the bar last night discussing the finer points of a single essay by Heidegger, with a group of students who treated me like a rock star. I need this sort of occasional reminder that, in the arcane world of the academy, I can legitimately claim to be the global expert on one minuscule piece of humanity’s knowledge base. That’s very cool, on the totally cerebral plane.

Yet I’m also here to soak in the sight, sound, and smell of the ocean. I’m here to sleep in late and then go for a run along the beach. I’m here to practice this experience of being alive and present. Right here, right now.

So this is a short post, and I may not be able to respond to comments quickly. I’m going out now to walk on the beach and decide which direction I want to run. Or maybe I’ll decide to simply walk today. Either way, I shall have fun.

Simplify, then add lightness

I hadn’t planned to write tonight. The process of making and then acting on decisions is emotionally wrenching for me. Last night I went to bed late and slept poorly. Although I obeyed the alarms on both iDevices and got up early enough this morning, I could not find the will to go running. I decided that since it was the Friday before that most famous of winter holidays, most of my colleagues were only going to work a half day and I could safely take off early and run this afternoon.

I wanted to tell you that as of today I’d met my goal of 500 miles in 2011, but I had to cut short both my Wednesday and Friday runs this week due to highly unusual side stitches that, I suspect, are related to my current stress. Mind, body — although I sometimes wish I could, I cannot experience these as separated, divided entities. So as of tonight I have run 498.5 miles this year. I should easily surpass 500 miles on Sunday — but I felt distressed that I couldn’t do it as planned today.

Yes, I know I am too hard on myself. But mind/body has spoken and forced me to listen.

It should have been a lovely run this afternoon. It was 70 degrees and I wore my wonderful new orange shorts. I may need to buy another pair — they were indeed that awesome. I enjoy being able to like the way I look in short shorts! Especially knowing how hard I’ve worked to be able to say that.

The title of tonight’s post came by way of a friend who commented offline (what’s that?) on my last post. Apparently that was Colin Chapman’s design mantra. Not being an English car person I confess I had to google the phrase and learned that he created the Lotus car and that this principle explicitly guided the design of the Europa.

It seems like a good design principle for life, doesn’t it?

Simplify, then add lightness. I need less stuff and more lightness. Less stress and more sky. Less stuff and more smiles. Less pain and more joy. Life is good and getting better. One step at a time.

“I am as you see me and I belong here.”

I was thinking about architecture the other day. Architectural theory played a big part in my dissertation on the experience of being in a place, as how can one have an experience of being in a place without having places, whether natural or built, in which to have one’s experience?

I love modern architecture, especially of the mid-20th century variety with its flat roofs and blank street faces opening to walls of glass and and inside-outside views to the rear. I was re-reading some passages in the book Thinking Architecture by the Swiss architect and architectural theorist Peter Zumthor, in which he quotes and openly credits the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s concepts of building, dwelling, gathering, place, and space. This was the “missing link” for me as I attempted to form connections between complex philosophical concepts, their realization in architecture, and the lived experience of those of us who dwell within built places.

In the brief quote referenced in the title of this post, Zumthor is speaking on behalf of a building, imagining how it sits and feels at home in its surroundings:

To me, the presence of certain buildings has something secret about it. They seem simply to be there.We do not pay any special attention to them. And yet it is virtually impossible to imagine the place where they stand without them…. They give the impression of being a self-evident part of their surroundings and they seem to be saying: “I am as you see me and I belong here.” (Zumthor, 2006, pp. 16-17)

I like this quiet statement of confidence and at-homeness. It is a seemingly simple yet consciously composed sense of presence, self-acceptance, complete and coherent in itself. “I am as you see me and I belong here.” To me this is the ideal, the essence, of being in a place. I strive to feel this way in my skin. To varying degrees, I feel it in my two homes, very different yet born from the same aesthetic sense. I can feel completely at home in either place while I am there. Sometimes I feel torn between the two places, which represent two quite different ways of being in the world. My heart belongs to the Pacific Northwest, but I have to say I appreciate having the option to go elsewhere when the winters get too dark, cold, and damp. It certainly is easier for me to go out the door at dawn to go running when the sun is shining and I have no worries about ice underfoot.

I belong here… but can a bi-platial person ever fully belong to either place? I wonder.

But compared to what?

It’s often said that life is strange, oh yes,
But compared to what?

~~ Steve Forbert, “January 23-30, 1978″

This business of creating a new life is complicated, messy, sometimes really scary, and most definitely nonlinear. Every time I think I’ve started to figure things out and take some steps in the right direction, something weird happens that distracts me, confuses me, or smacks me in the head on my way over the cliff.

The past few days have been like that. I’m really making an effort to get out, try new things, see and talk to real people face to face. It can feel fun and natural one moment and terrifying the next. As an introverted person, being in a crowd of people has has never been easy but it is especially hard for me now because I can’t go find Kurt when I get freaked out. I can feel comfortable and at ease in a large room full of people for a few moments, and then suddenly see or hear or feel something that makes me so overwhelmed with Kurt-memories (that I didn’t even know were ever present in that room) that I have to leave. I get that strangling tightness in my throat that my doctor insists is directly caused by anxiety (he told me that the ”lump in your throat” feeling is a literal, muscular phenomenon associated with anxiety).

Usually, when it’s not too bad, the best cure for that sort of anxiety is to just go out and run. All the shaky, fluttery feelings vanish once I settle into my running stride. But this weekend I didn’t even feel motivated to run. I seem to be one of those people who is affected by rapid changes (up or down) in barometric pressure, and by the winds that accompany those rapid changes. Wind makes me a little bit crazy; it always has. So I could not even consider going out this morning, but I was so unsettled, tired, shaky, and headachy that I couldn’t look at my treadmill either. Maybe tomorrow after work I will feel more like it. Maybe the wind will stop blowing. I’m registered to run a 5k “turkey trot” race next Saturday, and I intend to get out there and do it unless there is snow or ice on the ground… which there very well could be.

I want my life to move in the direction of a “new normal,” but I’m also aware that “normal” is an illusion; everything and everyone who is alive is changing all the time. “Complex adaptive system operating far from equilibrium” is a reasonably good definition of a living organism. If I want to keep living (and I do), then I have to accept that there will always be lump-in-the-throat moments, and that those very moments, no matter how strange, are the “stuff” of our lives. Life can be painful or just plain weird sometimes, but it’s also exciting to live in the midst of such strangeness, especially in the context of the “compared to what?” existential question.

One step at a time.

From “What now?” to “What if?”

It’s still subtle, and a lot of 2-steps-forward-1-step-back, but I can feel things continuing to shift for me. It’s no longer “How will I survive?” but something more like “How shall I live?” There is a future out there and I have the controlling say in how it will unfold.

Major life transitions are a subject on which I’m rather well-read, but when you are actually in the grips of living through one, it doesn’t help all that much to know the theoretical models or even to recognize where you are on those models. I’m not talking here about the overly-simple “five stages of grief,” but rather about life transition models (like William Bridges’ “ending/ neutral zone/ beginning” model), or developmental models (like Robert Kegan’s five-stage cognitive complexity model).

Per Bridges’ model, I went through my first major life transition as I was leaving husband #1, dealing with my simultaneous feelings of intense relief and massive guilt. It took months to years to fully leave that “ending” behind and fully grow into the new “beginning” with Kurt. I struggled mightily at times with the completely-unmoored experience of that “neutral” time. I had my whacko moments, but looking back now I can see that time as a healthy process of reclaiming my self-esteem.

The second major life transition would have been the year I had to work part time from mid-1995 to mid-1996, while I finally dealt with the grieving I’d deferred from my mother’s death in 1993 and the emotional after-effects of some health issues I’d had that same year along with major changes at work in 1994-95. I spent my two non-working days each week trying to make an herb garden grow in a rocky, windy, hopeless site, and developing a vision of the person I wanted to become. It was a vision that I eventually managed to make real in virtually every detail. That rocky “garden” was healing, and I emerged from that period a stronger person with a dream and a desire to grow myself.

Losing Kurt has clearly been my biggest and most challenging life transition so far. It was such a dramatic, caught-up-in-the-tide-of-events ending, that I had to spend a lot of time simply processing that the end had indeed happened — that the answer to the “what just happened?” question that I kept asking myself was quite simple: “He has died and left you alone, and now you must figure out how you will live for the rest of your life.”

Nearly five months later I think I’ve fully accepted the ending. I’m still very much in the neutral zone, where everything is scary and shifting underfoot, and the safest thing is to hunker down and let things simmer for a while. But I caught myself at dinner with friends last night laughingly imagining a first date with an unknown someone new. They were teasing me about the spreadsheet I’d have to create, with qualifications like vegetarian, runner, not afraid of heights, loves to travel. In case I have any secret admirers out there, I can guarantee that an invitation to go out to a movie is not going to win you a first date with me!

When I thought about it some more today, I found myself adding more qualifications to the list: well-educated, politically liberal, and so on — until I suddenly realized this was a highly narcissistic list! So much of the strength of Kurt’s and my relationship lay in our differences: he was outgoing, relentlessly optimistic, and opinionated; whereas I am introverted, cautiously skeptical, and (although opinionated) prone to see any issue from multiple perspectives and wind up saying only, “it depends.”

Which brings me to Robert Kegan. I loved his five-stage model of cognitive complexity partly because the last time I thought about it, I was a high-4 rapidly becoming a 5, which puts me in rather rare developmental territory. I’m no longer thinking so much about what’s good for me as what’s good for society, the species, all species, the earth, and beyond. Kegan says that it takes more than one life transformation a la Bridges before people can begin to make those transpersonal connections. A good social sciences graduate program that emphasizes critical thinking and making distinctions between epistemologies (ways of knowing) will help that process unfold as well. I can never look at anything through only one lens ever again… which sometimes has the effect of making seemingly easy decisions overly complex. Watch me grocery shopping and you’ll see what I mean!

I like to talk about my “epistemelogical crisis” in my second year of my PhD program; it was a genuine, crushing moment of realizing that I could not affirm that anything was objectively, indisputably ”true,” because all “truth” is provisional pending future validation or refutation — but if I was ever going to graduate, I needed to find one thing that was true for me and build something from there. It was my Descartes moment, but instead of “I think, therefore I am,” it was “the earth feels solid, real, and meaningful to me — now, what is the essence of that experience and the meaning that I make of it?”

As I’ve written here before, I started running as I was finishing my PhD, because I didn’t like the ten pounds I’d gained, wasn’t happy with the physical therapist’s verdict that I’d never walk again without pain, and needed a new goal to stave off the post-degree depression I’d been warned about. Running became yet another way for me to make contact (in a quite literal way) with the earth, to experience and spend more time in beautiful places. When Kurt got sick, I kept running because it kept me (in a quite literal way) grounded.

Now I run because I really like running. I like getting leaner, faster, and more limber. I like that I’m standing a little taller. And I suppose, in a tiny corner of my mind, I like running because I have a glimmer of hope that somewhere out there, there is a someone resembling a well-educated vegetarian runner who is not afraid of heights, loves to travel, and might be looking to run into someone who is sort of like me.

A girl can dream. And I know what powerful things dreams can be.