Being Grateful

Years ago Oprah introduced what she called a Gratitude Journal. I, along with many others, jumped on that bandwagon and began to religiously write down 4 or 5 things each day that I was thankful for. It was easy – I had two wonderful boys who were changing and growing daily. I found there were many things I could write about including how fortunate I was to have healthy and happy children. As these things tend to go I found myself slipping as it became harder and harder to not duplicate the same things day after day. I would pick up the journal and jot a few items down. Then I would forget about it for a few months and find it in my bedside table and pick it up again. The entries began to look like this: “I’m thankful for not feeling guilty about not writing for so long”. Not long after this my marriage ended and the book got packed away somewhere. I forgot about it.

(As an aside: Sometimes I feel the same way about this blog. I know I have a few followers, but don’t really know how often they check in, and if they even notice that it may be weeks between entries. So I am grateful to those of you who check in regularly and don’t lose hope in me.)

I found my old “gratitude journal” when I moved for the second time in 4 years. I flipped through it and found that not a lot had changed. I am not rich. I am not beautiful. I am not famous. I am not spectacularly good at any one thing. But I am still thankful for the health that I, and those close to me, enjoy. I’m thankful the writing muse deems me important enough to visit on occasion. I’m thankful for a great run on a cool morning. I’m thankful for having someone in my life to share things with. And though I don’t feel the need to write things down on a daily/weekly/monthly basis I still consider myself very fortunate in the general scheme of things.

Whenever I get upset at something that isn’t going quite as planned, for example finding myself hopelessly stuck in traffic, I try to halt briefly for a moment before I let it get to me. There are people in cities all over the world who have worse traffic woes than three cycles of a traffic light before getting through an intersection. I am fortunate that I don’t HAVE to use my car to commute on a daily basis. And perhaps that is why I get frustrated. I can usually walk faster than my car is going on some stretches. Those days I wish that I could just get out of my car, fold it up and put it in my pocket and then walk until the traffic volume spreads out and then just unfold the car and get back in and drive. In an ideal world…Instead, I plop in a CD or tune into a top-40 radio station (one of my guilty pleasures) and sing at the top of my voice. By the time a couple songs have played the traffic jam is usually behind me. Music gets me through (as you may have noticed in the last two posts) and I’m thankful for that in my life.

I think the trick is to stop and pause before you immediately assume something is going to be bad. There is a lot more to be grateful for than to be anxious about. I have wasted a lot of emotion in the past on dread that never materialized. A very wise person always tells me, “Everything happens for a reason.” Sometimes I have to search for that reason, but it is always there. And I am always grateful for it.

The one that ran away… (part II)

You know I don't even know what I'm hoping to find
Running into the sun but I'm running behind
Running on Empty – Jackson Browne

As I continue to explore this theme, I’m a little stunned and a lot ashamed of my reasons for running.

I met David one Halloween at the bar. I didn’t dress up. Neither did he. I was wearing a red hoodie so we pretended we had come as Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. He growled and I laughed. After a few dates I noticed that he had an aversion to wearing deodorant; he said that it attracted bugs in the bush – he was a forest firefighter. Then I found out that he was so homophobic that he wouldn’t use a pink towel or drink from a pink coffee mug. There were some things I just couldn’t ignore. We lived and worked in different towns so I thought it would be easy to let this fade away by not calling him. But a week later, after not hearing from me, and finding out from my parents where I was staying, he decided to come and visit. By sheer coincidence I had chosen that very day to drive to my parents place for a visit. As I rounded a tight corner on the highway I spotted David’s truck going in the opposite direction. Thinking maybe he hadn’t seen me I glanced in my rear view mirror to see brake lights go on. That was my cue to hit the gas. It took him over 10 miles to catch up to me. I pretended to be surprised to see him “behind” me. Soon after that I ran away for a month-long trip to Europe and when I returned there was little left to hang onto.

And then there’s the most superficial reason yet. I’d met Stan at the wedding of my University roommate. After chatting for most of the evening and learning that we both enjoyed biking, he asked me out on a biking date. We met up and headed off side by side down a quiet little street in the city. We heard a car behind us and Stan pulled up ahead of me so we were riding single file. I looked up to see a black matt of back hair curling out over the neck of his t-shirt. I suddenly developed a ‘stomach ache’ and with apologies to Stan headed home. The next time he called I told him that I’d gotten back together with an old boyfriend. (Coward that I was.)

Sometimes, it's harder to face myself than face the world
But there's nowhere to run girl
There's nowhere to run
No Place to Run – Gym Class Heroes

When I got married I thought I was finished with running. I’d found a place where I felt safe. Years went by and the urge to run never arose, until a few years after my children were born. But this time it was a different kind of running. I began to run for fitness. As I look back on it now, from a completely detached viewpoint, I can see that the physical running was only thinly disguised as running away. Each time I laced up my shoes and headed out the door I suddenly felt free of all encumbrances. But it was like I pushed the pause button - there were no phones ringing, no children to feed, no house to clean, no dinner to cook – I knew it would all be there when I returned, but for the time being, there was nothing but me, the feel of my shoes padding the gravel path and the sound of my breathing and heartbeat as I found my internal rhythm.

I’ve never been able to explain it succinctly except to say that life happens.

I want to live
I want to run through the jungle
The wind in my hair and the sand at my feet
Animal Song – Savage Garden

I know I wasn’t running away from responsibility. I loved being a mom to my children. I loved keeping a home. But there were obviously things that I didn’t love, and it was those things that were easier to run from, and hope they went away, than to deal with face to face. (For further dissection of this topic see Continual Evolvement.) I used to wonder if I was just being spineless and taking the easy way out, but I know that it would have been easier to stay than it was to run. People who know me know that I am very non-confrontational. In most cases I will choose the path of least resistance. So when they found out that I had run/walked away from a 12-year marriage many people were a little surprised, but said they could see it coming.

'Cause goodbye's on the tip of my tongue
Tell me there's a reason to stay
Cause I'm about to get up and run
Tip of My Tongue – Kelly Clarkson

As I further delve into my motives and dissect each of the situations I’ve outlined, there is a common theme, but one my readers wouldn’t have seen. In each of these situations - Nick, Kevin, George, David, Stan, my ex – I vaguely recall feeling slight trepidation during the initial bonding to these individuals. In all cases I also remember sloughing it off as “cold feet” and that I would get over it, or perhaps, used to it. Obviously I never did. That observation, quite frankly, frightened me. Was I destined to be a runner? Were all my future relationships doomed from the start? And then I thought about the ones from whom I didn’t run. I realized there was never that gut feeling that something wasn’t quite right. And in those situations, including the one I’m currently in, there is a feeling of just knowing it is right for me. If I’ve learned anything from this exercise it’s that my gut instinct is usually accurate. Although that’s small consolation for the people I ran from, some of whom had true and deep feelings for me, I’m somewhat bolstered by this insight.

“You are under the unfortunate delusion that simply because you run away from danger, you have no courage. You're confusing courage with wisdom.”
-Frank Morgan as the Wizard of Oz

The one that ran away… (part I)

As seems to be the pattern these days a conversation with a friend got me thinking about this. She’d mentioned that she’d recently reconnected with an old boyfriend, and had always thought of him as “the one that got away”. And I wondered to myself, “Did I have someone in my past that ‘got away’?” I couldn’t think of any old boyfriends from my past with whom I wished I could have had a do-over. Quite the opposite - in fact more often than not I remember being “the one who ran away”.

You run away / You could turn and stay / But you run away / From me
You Run Away -The Barenaked Ladies

I started running away in Grade One… There was a boy, Nick, in my class upon whom everyone had the requisite ‘crush’. Every day at recess the teacher had us line up at the classroom door, boys on one side girls on the other, before we could file outside for our 15 minutes of energy release. If you, as a girl, were fortunate enough to find yourself first in line, and Nick was first for the boys, you were considered an item, at least for the duration of recess. Nick had the cutest smile and eyes that seemed to sparkle with mischief. All the girls wanted to be first in line when Nick was there. And then one day I got my chance. He made some cute comments about “going out” with me at recess and I blushed. The bell ran and out we went with my two friends, Eve and Donna. We started chasing Nick around the school yard – back then it showed you liked someone. We ended up at the front of the school behind some lilac bushes. Nick looked conspiratorially at all three of us and told us that he’d show us ‘his’ if we showed him ‘ours’. Eve and Donna immediately said OK and looked at me. I took off running before I could answer. Three minutes later the three of them emerged from behind the bushes smiling and laughing and when they saw me they turned and walked the other way. I was wounded. I made sure I was never first in line in Grade One again.

And I ran, I ran so far away.
I just ran, I ran all night and day.
I couldn’t get away.
I Ran – A Flock of Seagulls

I ran throughout junior high school. At the time I assumed it was just because I was so shy. Forward boys made me nervous, cute-looking forward boys petrified me. I remember thinking that the only reason a cute-looking boy was showing interest in me was because he wanted something – something that I wasn’t willing to give. “But all the other girls are doing it” they would say, and I would think that there was something wrong with me that I just wasn’t ready to do that with anyone, whatever “that” was.
Once, the junior high schools had a joint dance with all the schools invited. I met Kevin at one of these dances. We locked gazes across the darkened gymnasium and he courageously walked over to me, through the throngs of girls on my side of the gym and asked me to dance the last slow dance. I’d thought he was cute and said yes. As we swayed back and forth to an ABBA song I vividly recall smelling his cologne. He’d borrowed his dad’s Old Spice. My friends told me later that he was playing with my long hair as we danced, twirling it around his finger. After the dance we exchanged phone numbers and met every now and then after school to skate-board down St. Charles Ave. It was a very long street that didn’t usually have a lot of traffic on it. Kevin and I never held hands and we definitely never kissed. Being naïve as I was I didn’t know that it would bother him, so when he made the obvious overtures I did the obvious thing; I turned the opposite way on my skateboard and ran away. I guess it shouldn’t have come as any surprise when he sent a friend to tell me that he didn’t want to “go out” with me anymore.

And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
Time - Pink Floyd

I was just out of University. I’d taken a job in the Forestry Office in town after graduation while I looked for a permanent job. I met George there one weekend when some friends and I attended a curling bonspiel that he was competing in. He asked me out shortly after that and we went on a few dates. He seemed nice and we grew close enough that he felt he was ready to confess a few things to me. He’d been in an accident years earlier and had injured his spine. Since that time he’d had “performance issues” and things weren’t that reliable anymore. He thought I should know. I said the only thing I could think of to say, “It didn’t matter.” But I lied. It did. Not long after that we were at a social. I’d had a couple too many drinks, something snapped and I ran. I left the social, in the middle of a very chilly March evening, without my coat or purse, and found myself running. I had nowhere to go. His house was locked, but the car out front wasn’t. So I hunkered down in the back seat not quite sure what I was going to do. He was understandably freaking out by my disappearance from the social (I heard this later of course) but eventually had to leave and come home where I sheepishly emerged from the car. He never asked why I had run away. I think he was afraid to because he didn’t want to know the answer. He forgave me instantly, and held me through the rest of the night, but it was the last night we spent together. I felt like a shallow fake and not worthy of him.

And so I lay here awake
As all the clouds fall away
Then fast asleep in your arms
Wake up wonder where we are
Try to freeze frame the day
Then the light starts to fade
I will scream at the sky
'til we drink the oceans dry
And so we run
And So We Run – David Usher

…to be continued