Twas Brillig

Hey, Brillig here.  Please welcome today’s guest-blogger, a dear bloggy friend who never fails to inspire me, Dr. Bolte.

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when i was little, according to my mom, i ran everywhere.

ran on the beach.

ran in the field.

ran from here to there, ran to do anything.

i was sassy and on the move.

i’m still sassy, but for many years i have been definitely not on the move.

on the day that my mom told me that, she was in the midst of
transferring old super 8 home movies onto dvd for my granddaddy’s
father’s day present. every time i would talk to her during the week,
she’d have new stories for me, of the time when she went to the grand
canyon as a teenager and forgotten how much they were in the car until
she saw the movies, which were just a succession of images of children
in the requisite 1960s tourist wear waving from beside a station
wagon.

on the day that my mom told me the story of my running toddlerhood, i
had been on the elliptical for an hour. i realized, in the midst of
the hour as i was counting iPod songs in an attempt to keep track of
my goal, that i really liked it. i should hate it. i thought i would
hate it. i was doing it to do it, not to love it. but i did.

at that moment, i began to wonder if maybe i am a runner after all.

i’ve never been athletic. not once in my life. i have fond memories of
bright shining moments of athletic effort, like the time i played
football with my friends in the park and loved it or all of the times
i rode my bike as a kid and found freedom in the wind in my ears. but
for the most part, i’ve lived a book life, a very sedentary book life.
but somewhere down deep, i always wanted to know if i could play
soccer. just never tried. i was never quick enough for something like
softball, because i always got tagged out before i could make it to
base. but what about basketball? it, too, was on my list of things to
know how to play…but i just never did it. i always thought it would
be incredibly cool to run a marathon, to be that kind of long-distance
runner. but i never tried. i never thought i could do any of those
things. i just didn’t think it was in my nature.

until i realized, that day on the elliptical, that maybe i have that
nature somewhere in me, just waiting to come out.

and when my mom told me that i ran everywhere as a child, that i was
unstoppable, i think something clicked for me.

we can be anything we want to be.

so i’m a book person. i like to be lazy sometimes and read all day in
my bed. that doesn’t mean that i can’t also be a 5K person. that
doesn’t mean that i can’t train myself to be whatever it is that i
want to be.

we put ourselves into too many boxes, i think.

i have put myself into too many boxes.

i am tired of boxes. aren’t you?

we are who we are. we all have innate talents. we all have gifts. when
we refuse to believe that we might have a gift and a talent and a
passion for something that just might be completely different than we
ever thought we could be, we lose out on cultivating a flicker of the
divine within us.

so, i’m working on being a runner.

i’m also working on being a runner who believes in her capacity to do
anything she wants to do.

i may never make it to a marathon. some days, i’m lucky if i make it
to the elliptical at all. and i may look like an idiot on the
treadmill as i try out these new running legs. but in october, i will
be running a 5K for breast cancer, in honor of my mom who puts one
foot in front of the other every day with courage and a great deal of
spunk. and on that day, i will prove to myself that i can do anything.

because, honestly, i think we can do anything.

we just forget that sometimes.