What most people don’t realize is that tonight is Twelfth Night, the night when everything is reversed, when kings are ruled by peasants, and the world is turned upside down. Traditionally, it marks the end of the twelve days of Christmas and is a night for merrymaking, wassail, pastries, and gift giving. It blows my mind that Americans would ignore another excuse for parties, drinks, gifts, and great food, but on the whole we have forgotten all about the twelve days of Christmas. By this point, we’re supposed to be five days into our 2012 diet and fitness program and focused on the projects and goals we have set for the coming year, not still reveling in a holiday that began last year.

When I sat down to write this post, I typed this sentence: It is only the 5th of January, and already I am running out of time! As I sit here, trying to figure out what this post is about, I am realizing that I am exhausted. This season, I didn’t take off nearly enough time from my job to rest and prepare myself for all the hard work that is to come, so already I am feeling stressed, looking at what lies ahead of me, and feeling completely overwhelmed and clueless as to how I will find the time to get it all done.

In my personal life, I’ve been mulling which word to choose for 2012 and, while trying NOT to make unrealistic resolutions I will never keep, trying to figure out exactly what vision I would like to hold for the year. Last night I sat in this same chair with a notepad trying to figure out how many hours are left in the week after a full-time job and commuting eat up about 55 of them and how to divide that remainder so I get enough exercise and sleep to lose weight and improve my health while still having enough time to read and write and explore the ideas that make life worth living and, oh yeah, spending time with my husband and the poor dog whose life is already lonely and mind-numbingly boring enough. So, if I spend five hours a week at the gym and want to write/read/research/experiment/do art sixteen hours a week and take the time to prepare all of my meals at home, I can have 7 hours of sleep per night. Or, I can cut back the writing et al. to 12 hours per week and get eight hours of sleep, but then how do I want to slice up those 12 hours between writing, reading, photography, blogging…. And who am I kidding? There is no way I am going to write from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. and then put the computer away and go to sleep by 9:15 so I can get up at 4:45 to be at the gym by 5:30. If the wheels are turning and the words are flowing, I’m going to be up ’til midnight trying to get a draft finished. Then, I’ll get four hours of sleep and maybe go to the gym but probably not and then I’ll start the next day already behind and feeling guilty. Ugh.

In the living room, my Christmas tree is still lit. Outside, the blue icicles and the white LED Christmas lights still illuminate the front of my house. Tonight Hans made it home before I did and plugged all the lights and the tree in for me so I would see them and get happy as soon as I turned onto our street. And I did get happy. The lights were a hug from him before I even turned off my car’s engine. I promised myself I’d stop plugging in the exterior lights after tonight – my way of dealing with the neighborhood peer pressure to pack them away – and take them and the Christmas tree down this weekend. But, if this is truly my last year to live, then that means this is the last night I will arrive home to my family in a house lit by Christmas lights. I will take down the Christmas tree and spend the rest of the winter in a dark living room, waiting for the light to return. And this makes me very sad. If this is my last Christmas, then I am not ready for it to be packed back into boxes.

And, as it is January, if I have less than six months remaining, how do I want to spend my time? Can I really begin the new projects of 2012 when there are still things from 2011 I want and need to do – like writing personal letters to Tad, Carri, Chris, and Patrick thanking them for helping to make 2011 wonderful and writing that recommendation for Martha that I’ve been writing in my head for months and finally writing to Scott to tell him to own his genius, no matter what labels the rest of the world tries to apply to him?

I think this New Year needs a gentler start. I am not setting anything in stone, not spending hours writing out specific goals for every month of the year, not creating charts to track daily actions designed to help me modify my behavior so that I more closely approximate perfection. I’m going to spend as much time as I need looking at my messy life, deciding what is truly worth my time, and exploring what makes me happy. I am going to spend evenings photographing the sunset off my deck, playing with paint with my nieces and nephew, and cuddling with the sweetest dog on the planet. I am going to hold my husband’s hand on the couch and in movie theaters and whenever he’s moving slowly enough that I can catch him. I’m going to call friends. I’m going to finish reading a novel! Then, maybe, I’ll make some plans.

The word Imbolc came to me in a dream a few nights ago. I did not know at the time that it was the name of a Sabbat that takes place at the beginning of February. Sounds like the perfect occasion to take down a Christmas tree.

When it comes to power, those three words must be on par with “I love you.”

If you are doing something you shouldn’t, those three words can be quite scary. With any luck, they may even set you on a better path.

But if you are feeling alone, invisible, or taken for granted, those three words can reaffirm your value in the world, convince you that you do exist, that you do count, that you are unique and beautiful. These are the words so many of us – even those of us who may not appear abandoned or lonely – long to hear, whether we are aware of our need or not.

As I think about how the economic upheavals of the past 3 years will reshape our society in the long-term and what recent events will teach us, I come down to 1 major lesson: Interdependence. This financial crisis has demonstrated that the governments, institutions, ideas, and people that populate this planet are intricately connected in ways that we have not previously appreciated and cannot fully predict or easily see. The truth is, we belong to a single body, a single organism. We all thrive or, ultimately, we all die. If we deny this, we die.

If our goal as a species is to thrive as part of a healthy planet, this newly focused lens of interdependence highlights the many challenges that exist at every level of human interaction, from relations between nations down to relations between next door neighbors.  In essence, we are being challenged to let go of our Us vs. Them mentality and widen our gaze beyond that of our own narrow experience to include that our neighbor’s–whether that neighbor lives a few feet away or thousands of miles. We are being called to witness the events of the world, how they affect us individually, and how they affect others, as well as to consider the part we play in those events.

At their foundation, the protest movements that have swept around the globe in 2011 have been an answer to this call. Individuals all over the world are stepping forward to shine light on the injustices in their lives and to call for change. They are not all speaking with one voice; they are not all moving in one direction; they are not all pointing to the same problems or proposing the same remedies. They are, however, listening to each other. They are stretching their capacity to view the world from the perspective of others. They are, in essence, learning to see with new eyes.

I don’t have to debate whether this rEvolution is mine or if the protestors in the streets speak for me. I don’t have to take an overnight bus to Wall Street or even leave home. I don’t need to make a sign or chant any slogans. To spark my own rEvolution, I need only truly look at the person next to me and say, “I see you.”

What I really want is an accounting of where the first six months of the year have gone. Seriously! Time makes no sense to me any more. It comes and goes and in a blink a whole ‘nother month has vanished. I want June back! Some truly awesome and rewarding things have happened for me in the first half of this year, but they are taking their toll. I am about maxed out with stress and from the creep of my professional life into what I would like to think of as my private life, and I have a whole list of goals for this year that I haven’t even begun to aim toward.

As I am preparing to release a memoir of my experiences during the largest cross-country bicycle event in U.S. history, I now recognize that my biggest, truest goal is to learn to be the Traveler without ever needing to leave home; to be always present and aware of newness and beauty wherever I am; to be my best self in the midst of my life, whatever that life entails at the moment.

At the same time, I really do want to travel more. I joined Chris Guillebeau’s Travel Hacking Cartel this year, and have racked up more than 100,000 airline mileage points for myself and more than 50,000 for my husband in the last two months alone. There is a serious trip in my future–I just don’t know where or when yet. (Chris would advise that you have a destination and a timeframe in mind as motivation before you begin travel hacking, but my motivation to Go! and See! and Learn! seems to be all I need.)

I have this sense that I should go into the world to write about environmental issues and amazing places and good work being done by people who inspire me. But do I really need to go to Borneo or Costa Rica or Belize to do that? Can’t I find plenty to keep my inquiring mind busy and my bleeding heart satisfied without leaving my own community? Wildness is everywhere if you look hard enough, and good people do good things every day of the week in towns and cities all around my own country, my own state. And yet, I am driven to experience new places and people, and, maybe more importantly, to experience myself in new situations and locations. The craving to be on the move is getting stronger the farther into my past the Big Ride Across America slips. (I daydream daily about being able to do the week-long “Mountains to Coast” Cycle NC ride in October, even though I know full well all of my vacation time will be gone before fall even begins.)

So, as I look over the impressive (if I do say so myself) but short list of things I’ve accomplished this year and the considerably longer list of things I have not, I am faced with several questions. How do I recognize and express what is already contained within while also seeking to learn more? How do I both “be the traveler without leaving home” and build a life that places more significant emphasis on travel and adventure? At the moment, I have absolutely no idea.

At the library last week I stumbled upon the book A Year to Live by Stephen Levine, and to complicate things further – in order to, ultimately, simplify things – I have decided that today is the beginning of my 365-day mindfulness experiment in living as if this were my last year on Earth. The hope of Levine’s book, I believe, is to help you face your fears about death – and about life – so that you can live fully awake in each moment that you are blessed to be alive. This includes increasing your capacity for gratitude, for forgiveness for yourself and others, and for weathering uncertainty with grace, as well as being aware of (but not necessarily reacting to) the various emotions and urges that drive behavior and shape experience. I am hoping the process will help me act more frequently from an urge toward freedom and joy and less from an aversion to discomfort and fear.

I have read a little more than half of the book and I have been struck by so many lovely, simple-sounding phrases that seem so elusive, my favorite of which is “we rest in being.” Wow! What must that feel like? Bye-bye to-do list, today I am resting in being. Sounds heavenly! (I know, someone out there is saying, “You’re missing the point! You can rest in being while you knock out the to-do list!” But I’m fried right now, and the luxury of “just being” is so appealing, regardless of the fact that I probably have no friggin’ idea how to actually participate in such a state.) The sentence that sparked this particular post, however, is:

This is the big dream in which we are awake to the nature of our sleepiness, and know that our life is not defined by its experiences but by the heart that receives them.

Doesn’t that just about say it all? This tension between the ego’s emphasis on experiences and the heart’s emphasis on being open to whatever comes fascinates me and seems completely worthy of a year’s exploration.

Last night, as I was preparing to begin my new, only year, I could feel myself begin to pull away from the idea: I’m so exhausted right now, maybe I should put this off until next month after I get back from the festival? Or maybe even until September after I do the Ride Without Limits? It would be nice if I could give such an important experiment my full energy and attention, and now is really not the time for that. Wow. I hadn’t even been given the one year to live “sentence” yet, and already I was trying to postpone facing the possibility of death!

I quickly realized, however, that people who are truly going to die this year don’t get to put off their last year until it fits conveniently in to their work schedule or until they have the energy to deal with it. And putting this off would mean continuing to live much the way I have been: tired, frazzled, motivated by fear at least as often as by joy, and constantly in a state of striving. It would mean putting off facing real fears and continuing to live in a swirl of conflicting ideas about who I am and who I “should” be. A year of living mindfully, I’m thinking, might go a long way toward helping me gain clarity about what direction my life should take next.

And so, today, I am grateful for the opportunity to learn to live this year fully. As Mr. Levine might suggest, it’s time to catch up with my life.

Before the ride began, I had never participated in any organized rides. I didn’t even have a bike when I signed up for the adventure nine months earlier. So on the first full day of summer, June 22, 1998, I was an overweight, asthmatic, novice cyclist who was already well acquainted with the SAG (Support and Gear) bus as we climbed along the Lewis and Clark trail through Clearwater National Forest toward a small, gravelly, clear-cut lumber camp at the top of a mountain that would serve as our home for the evening. Many of the riders who had a goal of finishing each one of the summer’s miles astride their bikes would no doubt have deemed my first week a failure. Or, perhaps more accurately, they would have deemed me the failure. I, however, had come to terms with my physical limitations early on and decided that the summer’s adventure happened regardless of my mode of travel. I could be as present, as profoundly alive and awake, on a bus as I could on a bike. I was going to make the most of every moment. For me, Day 8 passed in a sunny, joyful moving meditation spent among friends and ended with a rainbow arcing through the twilight as our camp was bathed in deep, orange light.

Today, I am engaged in the process of pushing Your Mileage May Vary, a memoir about the Big Ride, out into the world. I had a finished draft of the manuscript by the summer of 2001, but while I received several letters of interest from agents, no one snapped it up prior to my move to North Carolina in 2003. The manuscript got put away as the more immediate demands of finding a job and a place to live took precedence, but it resurfaced periodically for revisions, refusing to let me abandon it altogether. My husband and my friends have lived with me and this manuscript for so long they are thoroughly sick of us both; yet, they keep urging me onward as I complete each step that will eventually launch it.

I need to get this manuscript out into the world because that is how I will finally finish the trip. Publication Day will be my true Closing Ceremony. I did not ride every one of the miles of the Big Ride, but when I publish this manuscript, I will have demonstrated, if only to myself, a different kind of courage and a different kind of perseverance. I will be making good on a promise I made to myself – a promise I, apparently, can’t bear to break.

The problems arise when I forget one of the best lessons I learned on the Big Ride: comparisons don’t matter. I loved my Big Ride experience and finished feeling proud of what I’d accomplished. But, at regular intervals since the ride’s conclusion, I have jumped perspective and started to judge my experiences, my “performance,” and my choices through someone else’s eyes. I’m never sure exactly who that someone else is, but I feel certain that someone somewhere–potentially many someones–will judge me harshly when the book is released. Since “death before SAG” was a mantra for several Big Riders that summer, it is not a stretch to imagine some of the harshest criticism coming from any of the 729 other cyclists who participated in the event.

The fear of these judgments has been crippling at various stages of the writing and editing process. It has only been made worse by agents and editors asking me to “justify” my manuscript’s validity in the marketplace. How can anyone really say that her memoir fills a gap that no other manuscript has filled or argue for why his memoir is better than all of its competition?

To get through this, I have finally realized that I have to take off one hat before I put on the next one. The Writer has to stop being the Rider if she is going to make the most of the material she is given. She can’t spend all of her time feeling guilty for getting on a SAG bus or regretting a thought that went through her head during an exchange with another rider if she is going to get on with the business of writing. The Editor has to stop being the sensitive, protective Writer if she is to shape the words for their best effect. And, the Marketing Manager has to stop being the embarrassed Rider, the shy Writer, and the constantly tinkering Editor if she is to put the book out in a manner that will garner the largest possible audience. Knowing this and accomplishing this, however, are two very different things.

I am at the Marketing Manager stage and yet I am battling the Rider, Writer, and Editor daily. The Rider wants me to publish the book without telling anyone – especially other Big Riders; she thinks (erroneously) that readers will simply stumble upon the book and happily shell out money to read a memoir from an unknown writer. The Writer wants me to wait to publish the book until she is happily ensconced in the middle of her next project and “won’t care as much” if the book gets ridiculed, or more likely, completely ignored. The Editor is the easiest to manage – all I have to do is keep her from opening the manuscript, because if she reads anything, she will want to change it.

The thought that keeps me going is that I have, at each of the previous stages, done the best I could. The Rider was completely overwhelmed and underprepared for the journey she undertook and yet she stuck it out, in her own way, and found meaning, joy, and long-lasting friendships everywhere she went. The Writer did everything she could to tell the story accurately and honestly, to preserve everyone’s secrets but her own, and to shape the actual events into a narrative someone might actually enjoy reading. The Editor hired someone to help her, researched grammar rules constantly, and did the best she could to preserve the language and perspective of the 29-year-old cyclist, despite the fact that she was getting constantly older and more removed from the events of 1998. And, now, I as the Marketing Manager owe it to the Rider, Writer, and Editor, to bring the project home. The book deserves the best cover I can design, the best copy I can write, a fun and appealing website, and someone standing behind it who believes in it. Someone who isn’t afraid to tell people about the book’s existence, regardless of the outcome.

Yes, as a purely literary endeavor, Your Mileage May Vary may still fail. There’s a chance that my experiences really are not worthy of a book. There’s a chance that I wrote a bad book. There’s a chance that the book still needs substantial editing to be worthy of publication. And there’s a chance that, even if I wrote a good book about a worthwhile journey, there is not a large enough audience for my memoir to make it “viable,” or, worse, that I do not know how to find the right audience for my book even if it does exist.

All that matters at this point, though, is that I continue moving the project forward. The contract I have is with myself alone. I have struggled too long to give up now. So for the foreseeable future, I will be keeping my eyes on my own work and reminding myself that in publishing, as in cycling, your mileage may vary – and that’s okay.

I have always tried to be a good girl.

It’s sad, but true. I have always been the kind of person to learn the rules, follow the rules, and even, annoyingly, expect others to follow the rules.  I have been the park ranger asking you to remove your dog from the marine wildlife sanctuary (the Dog Beach is just a mile down the road, after all) and breaking your child’s heart by asking him to leave the shells he’s so carefully collected behind because they belong on the beach. I have been the neighbor who chases you down and offers you a baggie to pick up after your dog when you try to walk away and leave a fresh pile. I have been the cyclist who yells at you to “use your voice” when passing, and then yells my apologies for your rudeness to the person ahead of me as you also pass her without letting her know you’re there.

It’s not that I love rules, it’s that I understand the purpose they serve.  In general, if they make sense, I follow them and ask you to do the same.  (Believe me, I’ve lived in enough neighborhoods with Homeowners Associations to know that not all rules are good rules! If you want to leave your Christmas lights up until Halloween or hang unlined purple curtains with unicorns on them in your twin daughters’ bedroom with the street-facing window, go for it.)

I have to admit that when it comes to some rules - such as social ones - there is also an element of conformity involved, and with others – such as business ones - a fear of failure.

Take writing, for example. I still remember learning various grammar and punctuation rules in elementary school and I still cling to most of them - even though everyone else seems more than happy to throw them out - because they make sense and help make reading an orderly, coherent experience. Then, I went to graduate school to learn the “business” of professional writing: all the how-to’s and the industry standards and the best practices. I wanted to learn how to be a good writer as well as how to maximize my publishing opportunities and how to build a career. I learned how to format a poem vs. a short story vs. an article vs. a screenplay, how to choose which editor on the masthead to send your submission to, how to read a publication to determine whether your style, voice, or subject is a good match, when and how to seek an agent, what to expect from a publishing contract, how to set rates and ask for a raise, how to track submissions and when and how to follow up with an editor.  In more recent years, I’ve read about how to build a successful blog and how to build a platform before you even begin writing your book. 

All the while, I’ve been so obsessed with “doing it right” that I haven’t done anything at all – nothing of consequence, at least.  Even this blog, which I began with such enthusiasm, has been a victim. I write a blog post and happily send it out into the world, then soon after get reminded that a ”successful blog” is one that is targeted to deliver a specific kind of information to a specific audience. This causes me to feel anxiety that my blog is about me (I’m supposed to try to fool you into thinking my blog is about you) and not targeted and really random, and as a result, several months pass before I allow myself to forget that my blog is doomed to “failure” long enough to write another post.  So, not only am I failing to build a successful blog, I’m also failing to satisfy my own needs for self-expression.

And, I’m sick of it.  Constantly trying to color inside the lines is exhausting! So, here’s public notice that, from now on, I’m only going to follow the rules I want to follow.  I’m 41 years old and ready to start making it up as I go along and making my own mistakes.  Seriously, what mistakes can I make at this point that I really can’t recover from?  So maybe I don’t maximize my opportunities or chart a nice, neat line to ultimate success.  At least I’ll be putting myself out there and making myself happy.  Entrepreneurship expert Pam Slim likes to say, “Test often, fail fast.”  I think I could learn to love that phrase.

So, the two cliches I intend to keep at the front of my mind going forward:

1. Rules are made to be broken,

and

2. It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission (my husband’s personal favorite).

What I’m really saying here is that there are no “life police” checking to see if I’m following the rules for how to be a good adult or writer or wife or aunt or planetary citizen, and no one else knows me the way I do.  It’s time to stop trying to stuff myself into the boxes I think society expects me to fill and realize once and for all that I’m me and, no matter how I twist or turn or suck in, I’m never going to fit into a box made for or by someone else.  Any role I take on has to adapt to fit me because I’m no longer going to attempt to edit myself to fit into it.

Time to let it all hang out and enjoy doing it my way!  (Sorry! Couldn’t help it – I was a child of the ’70s, after all.)

Eventually, however, the number of problems that have arisen reaches some unforeseen tipping point at which the problems suddenly feel overwhelming.  It doesn’t matter that I have solved several of them and that only one or two problems are present currently, the process of trying to achieve my goal only to be continually thwarted by complication after complication becomes simply exhausting.  At this point, I throw up my hands and declare the complexity of the problem is just too great for me to manage.  And sometimes, I will drop the project completely.  Or at least for several months or even years before returning to look at it again with fresh eyes.

Sometimes, however – rarely, really – I realize that it is exactly because something is complex and difficult that it appeals to me.  If it didn’t have several layers of problems to solve, I would get bored and probably drop the project quickly.  When I realize this, there is a happy explosion in my brain and I am able to dive right back in and continue knocking down problems.

The most recent case of this comes from the fact that I recently signed up to cycle 200 miles in 2 days with The Ride Without Limits event to benefit Easter Seals – United Cerebral Palsy.  I have been on the email list for this ride every year since its inception, yet I never felt up to taking on the challenge either of fundraising or trying to get back up to that level of cycling skill. This year, however, I developed a pretty bad case of plantar fasciitis that limited my ability to walk far or fast and completely knocked me out of any chance of competing in triathlons this summer.  I have been afraid of cycling in North Carolina since I arrived eight years ago, but had started doing a thirteen mile route last summer to prepare for the two sprint triathlons I finished. Without really thinking through how much preparation a ride comprised of back-to-back centuries might require, I impulsively signed up with only seven weeks to train and raise the $250 donation minimum.  My first day back on the bike was a 52-mile group training ride of which I was able to complete 41 miles.  I was pretty impressed with myself and decided I was definitely in.

The challenges started coming almost immediately: what routes to cycle? how to manage water and bathroom stops when riding unsupported? how to get my stomach to accommodate Gatorade when the temperature was over 100 degrees without making me sick? how to get rid of the foot numbness and pain I experienced around the 30-mile mark?  how to manage the lower back pain I also experienced around the 30-mile mark? how to manage the frequent and numerous saddle sores that made consecutive days of riding especially painful (oddly, a relatively new problem for me)? how to find the time in my week to get in twelve to seventeen hours of training? how to manage my asthma?

I have not been satisfied with any of the routes I’ve tried.  My favorite option, though definitely the most boring, is to ride the same 13 mile loop I used for training last year four, five, or six times in a row until I’ve put in the miles I need.  This route, even though it has no shoulders and uses one road with regular, high-speed traffic, ensures I’m never far from my car and a cooler of water or a soccer field with porta-potties.  I’ve tried the American Tobacco Trail a couple times, but this can be challenging and slow (and actually quite dangerous!) due to the number of walkers, runners, and families who fill its narrow lanes on the weekends.  Plus, driving an hour to the trail and another hour home turns a six-hour ride into an eight-hour day, and I’d probably get more benefit staying closer to home and cycling those extra two hours instead of commuting.  I also learned about http://www.bikely.com and was able to find a “50-mile” route that went right past my house, but the route turned out to be 60 miles and includes stretches of roads that I don’t feel safe riding, so I haven’t repeated it beyond my first attempt.

I got new shoes – two sizes larger than the ones I used to cross the country 12 years ago! – which seems to have solved the foot pain and numbness, and I raised the handlebars in an effort to relieve the lower back pain that made me get off the bike every five miles to stretch after mile 35 but the back pain persisted.  On a long ride on my fourth weekend of training, I realized that one of my basic assumptions – that I could cycle 100 miles simply by staying on the bike 8 to 10 hours – was flawed because there was a very real chance that my core was not strong enough to allow me to sit on the bike that long!  If I had to get off to stretch every 5 miles for two-thirds of the day, I would not have enough time in which to complete the 100 miles, let alone be able to manage the constant pain.  So I immediately found and began practicing core exercises recommended by Active.com and, after only a week, I saw an increase in my strength, a decrease in my pain, and the happy ability to stay on the bike for twelve or thirteen miles at a time during this past weekend’s sixty-mile ride.

The moment I fell apart, though, and nearly threw in the towel came last Tuesday at about 5:45 a.m.  Just the day before I had seen a pulmonologist/lung specialist who said my lungs sounded perfectly clear and questioned my continued need for the daily dose of Advair that has completely changed my life since the prolonged asthma attacks I suffered on The Big Ride.  On Tuesday morning at 5:40 I climbed on a spin bike for an early class and realized I was having an asthma attack!  I nearly cried right there on the bike because I realized how many systems you have to manage in long-distance cycling–feet, ankles, knees, body/seat contact points, back, neck, leg muscles, stomach, lungs–along with the variables associated with heat, hydration, nutrition, and recovery.  It was just too much.  My lungs, apparently, were always going to be a wild card and an asthma attack could knock me out of any event at any point.

As it turns out, I didn’t cry, I just got really, really angry.  I finished the class, spinning at a constant tempo when my lungs prevented me from doing speedwork or climbs, showered, went to my car, called my husband – and cried.  I was so ready to be done.

But somewhere along my 75-minute commute to work, it occurred to me that I had chosen long distance cycling–just as I had triathlon–because it was a complex problem and one I had little assurance of mastering.  If it were easy, I wouldn’t bother with it. By the time I arrived at work, I was nearly giddy for having figured this out and completely dedicated to seeing the challenge through.  That evening in the 6:00 spin class, I had another asthma attack but instead of getting angry and frustrated, I remembered that I could up my dose of Advair from once daily to twice, dose with my albuterol inhaler every four hours, and try nasal lavage to decrease my chances of future attacks.  Realizing I had a plan I could follow–or the resources to find one–when a problem arose was comforting and has given me more confidence in the last week of training.  With ten days left to prepare for the ride, I am extremely proud of what I’ve accomplished with my training to date, but I know that on some level my ability to finish 100 miles two days in a row will be out of my control.  I’m going to show up, make a valiant effort, and be as surprised as anybody at how it all turns out.  I need a good surprise right about now!

As I have considered my penchant for taking on complex challenges, it occurred to me that maybe it’s time for me to create my own complex challenge with which to wrestle instead of accepting challenges defined by someone else.  I don’t regret for a moment having agreed to cycle on behalf of those with physical disabilities, but I do wonder if I don’t bounce from event to event in part to distract myself from the reality that I am not pushing myself hard enough in other areas of my life that matter most.  Is the challenge I really want to take on too complex?  Am I really not ready for it? Or am I refusing it simply because I am so emotionally invested in its “outcome” that I can’t bear to fail at it?  (Or maybe I can’t bear to succeed?)

What about you? What level of complexity do you find appealing? Do you experiment with different levels or find that there’s a fairly consistent level of difficulty in the challenges you set for yourself?  And, like me, is there a challenge sitting in front of you that you have yet to accept because it is one of your own definition and it somehow scares you more than others?  If so, I’d love to hear about it!

What I forget is that even if I think my body can go without it, my mind can’t. What I can’t immediately see is that tension builds up there, too, and this tension is even more dangerous. When stress accumulates in my brain, my picture of the world and my role in it gets distorted, my sense of my own power diminishes, my ability to stay grounded in the moment nearly disappears. Worry and fear-based thinking overtake calm and joy and the knowledge that I am exactly where I should be. I begin to strive which I experience as an attempt to mentally bend a situation to my will while becoming emotionally exhausted and even more frustrated in the process. Striving to change rather than accept. Striving to speed up rather than follow the natural rhythm of a process. Striving to have it be done rather than patiently, systematically doing. Wanting it all, fully formed, and perfect NOW rather than enjoying the organic unfolding and growth. Needing to check it off my list so I can move on to the next piece of the Universe with which I must do battle. Because that’s exactly what I’m doing–battling the Universe.

I didn’t go willingly into Danielle’s class this year. I had participated in her Energy Healing classes last year and been blissed to the max after each 90 minute session, but I balked at the idea of sweating in public and doing more strenuous work in a true yoga class. I prefered to do my Power Yoga at home by myself, doing the exact same poses in the exact same sequences every time I practiced without any witnesses to my body’s limitations. But the classes were given to me as a gift from my boss, so I went. It was frustrating, exhausting, maddening. The top of my yoga pants would roll down compelling me to pull it up after every pose, I couldn’t breathe in Child’s Pose, I couldn’t kick my feet over my head into Plow (well, maybe I could, but I would probably never walk again if I did), my shoulders were too tight to attempt Wheel, there was just too much of me to squeeze into some of those poses. And to top it off, when I thought I was so exhausted I couldn’t possible do another sequence, Danielle would invariably say, “Step or hop back to Plank,” signalling the beginning of yet another series of movements. At first, I could actually feel anger and rebellion well up in me when I felt she was pushing me beyond my limits. The Universe had shrunk to just my mat, me, and Danielle. I had two choices: lay down on the mat in protest, i.e., continue to battle the Universe, or step back to Plank and push myself through another series. This is how I learned to surrender. To let go of the anger and just keep moving – because with the exception of one day when I hadn’t yet recovered from the flu, invariably I could keep moving (regardless of whether I wanted to) – until Danielle finally said I could stop.

At the end of class I had been wrung out, physically and emotionally. My will had been reduced back to a reasonable size and I was too exhausted to worry or strive for anything more that day. I could move through the world in a state of peaceful presence, do my work without judgment, and enjoy being in my body.

Tonight, I’m awake typing this because when I went to bed worries about my finances wouldn’t let me fall asleep. When it comes to money, in some ways I feel I’ve been caught in a one step forward, two steps back situation (which is not really a fair assessment because, by any measure, I’ve been blessed), and I’m frustrated that emotional issues, and the same old time-management issues, have kept my writing and publishing from progressing more quickly. I see a happily creative professional future but I can’t seem to manifest it fast enough to satisfy my expectations. But like it or not, I can’t draw the right tenant for my house to me any faster through worry. I can’t control whether a publisher has the funds or the time to take on a new writer right now or whether an editor has already assigned a story very similar to mine to another writer. I can’t instantly materialize clips I haven’t done the work to earn.

So it’s time for more yoga. Lots of yoga. Yoga to melt my body and my fears. Yoga to shrink my will back to an appropriate size. Yoga to compel me to write every day without worry about outcomes. Yoga to support my efforts to adopt a healthier eating and exercise plan so I don’t lose my eyesight – or my life. Yoga to refocus my thoughts and actions on what I can do, experience, explore, and be, rather than what I can’t.

I’ve been out on the bike twice this week and I’m stronger than I was in my first race–I’m working in my big chain ring now, anyway. 

Plus, I bought new shoes and a new pair of compression shorts, and Hans drove out to check out the lake with me last Sunday and it’s much less scary than Lake Washington was.  It’s smaller and friendlier!  Mary and I are going together to packet pick-up tomorrow night and we’ll have a chance to get in the water to see how cold seventy degrees really is.  I’ve spent lots of time visualizing myself being relaxed and purposeful in the water and successfully completing the swim.  I’ve also spent a little bit of time feeling the panic rise in my body and mind and visualizing how I will calm myself down if that happens for real on Saturday. 

I’ll be starting in the last wave, composed of all women age 35 and older.  I would have preferred to have the race waves ordered from older to younger the way Danskin does, so that I wouldn’t be the slowest racer AND starting in the last wave.  I wrote to the organizers to tell them I think I’m likely to be the last finisher and that I would prefer they not hold the awards ceremony on my account, but one of them wrote back and said, “don’t worry about it; just have fun.”  Yeah, like having 299 participants and all the organizers, support, and families  waiting for you to finish is fun! 

But we will see.  Maybe I won’t be last.  Maybe I’ll surprise myself.  Maybe I’ll remember to keep my body relaxed and efficient.  Maybe I’ll keep my breathing more controlled at the beginning of the swim and maybe I’ll stick to my run/walk schedule instead of allowing myself to walk whenever I feel discouraged.  Maybe I won’t feel discouraged.  Maybe I’ll speak to myself (in my head and out loud as may be needed ) in supportive, encouraging ways.  Maybe, I’ll choose to have fun.

I think I can choose that.

I am having a small dilemma that I need to resolve quickly–several weeks ago would have been the appropriate time, but here I am still stressing and stuck. 

When I did the triathlon in June, I met Mary and learned that she lives in my neighborhood.  A few weeks later, she was driving by and recognized me out walking the dog and stopped to chat.  We have since pointed out our respective houses to each other and spoken less than half a dozen times, but in that time I told her about the open water sprint triathlon I was considering doing October 3, she looked it up online, and the next time we saw each other, we agreed to do the race together. 

Yay!!  Training partner! 

Yay!! Race day buddy! 

But, it hasn’t quite worked out that way.  We haven’t exchanged contact info and unless we cross on the street, we don’t see each other.  We agreed to go look at the lake where the tri is taking place a few weekends ago, but the weekend came and went without us catching up with each other and actually setting a time.  So we haven’t visited the lake together.  Even worse, I haven’t visited any lake at all.  And worst of all, I haven’t even signed up for the race–which I was informed tonight in an email from the race directors is 78% full and closing this weekend.

The Whole, Big, Whiny List of Reasons Why I Don’t Want to Do the Race 

After the last triathlon concluded, I said to myself, “see, you CAN follow a training schedule!”  Then I said, “But if you don’t want to finish last in your next triathlon, you really need to rock on the bike–your true strength–and shore up the running–your biggest challenge.  So let’s create a NEW training schedule!”  And I did.  I created a beautiful, dare I say perfect, training schedule and posted it on the refrigerator so I could see where I was every day and proudly check off each workout as I completed it.

The problem with perfection is that it has no place in my real life, which this summer included: finally finding someone awesome to create the website I need for work, trying (in my weird way) to get geared up to publish the book, writing some, drawing some, trying to figure out how to keep an art gallery open, and trying to buy a new house.  It doesn’t sound that horrible until you take into account that the training schedule I created included three swims, three runs, and three bikes per week PLUS a 30 minute walk each day (I have to walk the dog, anyway, right?) PLUS five days of circuit training, even though most serious triathletes only lift weights in the off season.  If rocking at this triathlon were my only goal for the summer, I might have been able to approximate that schedule – but the truth is, the plan and I were both doomed to failure the moment I printed and posted it.

I did a few of the workouts for the first few weeks, then I got discouraged and busy with other more pressing things and I stopped going to the pool altogether.  I haven’t been on my bike for several weeks–even though the last two times I rode I was finding new gears and getting excited about my progress.  Running, oddly enough, has fared the best, maybe because I can do it in the dark before anyone is up to see me chugging along and because it requires the least amount of prep time.  But now I’ve been having problems with the knee I injured prior to the Big Ride, I know I need new shoes, and I’m reluctant to get back out there.

And since I’m whining, I may as well post ALL of my excuses: I need new shorts for the race–at the last triathlon I had to keep pulling my shorts up in the water!, as well as new running shoes; I haven’t been in open water since 2002 and without some practice and mental preparation I might seriously not survive the swim; and the weather has turned cold and the thought of doing a lake swim does not turn me on (although the water probably won’t be any colder than Seattle lake temps in the summer!).  And the really big one: if I enter the race, I probably will finish the race, but I will likely finish last–potentially by a much bigger margin than I did earlier this summer. 

So, to Sum Up:

Doing the race means spending at least $200 on race fees and gear three weeks before I’m going to close on a new house, potentially dying of panic-induced drowning in COLD open water, and (provided I live) holding up the award ceremony by half an hour as all other 299 participants wait for me to drag my butt to the finish line.

What I Could Do, if Mary Weren’t Part of the Equation:

I would skip the race, simplify my training schedule to something like swimming two mornings a week, doing two long bike rides a month, and walking five miles a day until I can get new running shoes, then transitioning into training for the half-marathon I’d like to do in March.

What I Could Do, Take 2:

Because Mary is part of the equation, I feel obligated to do the race.  I could sign up tomorrow, get out to a lake this weekend for some open water experience,  do a thirty mile ride on Saturday, buy a new pair of shoes (and plan on holding my shorts up while I swim?), and at the race try to get in the water in a middle wave so I’m not finishing every leg dead last.

What I’d REALLY Like to Do:

NOT sign up for the race but knock on Mary’s door and offer to be her training partner for the next 10 days–I’d be happy to do some open water swims or get out on the bike with her–and be her chauffeur and cheering section on race day.  Parking is two miles away from the race start, so she might really appreciate having someone drop off her and her gear so she doesn’t have to deal with shuttles.

The question that arises from that scenario, however, is: if I’m going to do all of those things (lake swims, bike rides, going to the race), why not race?  And I think the answer is that I just know I’m not trained, which means the race has a really good chance of being no fun at all.  Bottom line: I just don’t want to do it.

Opinions?

So, what do you think?  Do I power through, make good on my promise to Mary, lay out the cash for new gear and race fees, do my best, and suffer all the physical and emotional consequences of this summer’s poor time and expectation management?  Or, is it okay to ask Mary to do the race alone and offer to do everything short of crossing the starting line of the race to support her?

Did you make it through the full piece or did you cut out early?

I found it mesmerizing, and when I did cut out early–I watched the first few minutes of it at work and needed to get back to doing actual work–I found it difficult to pull myself away.  I found myself asking, why is it so difficult to stop listening? and I’ve been turning that question over in my mind ever since.  It turns out, though, that some of the people on the email list did not share my fascination and had no trouble clicking away to something else.

So here’s my question for them and for anyone else who didn’t last through the whole piece: what would happen if you didn’t watch the video, but only listened to it as though it were a piece of music?  Would you find it engaging enough to listen to the entire piece?  Personally, I find Jaap Blonk’s face interesting–to me it almost appears that the recitation of this poem over the years has carved his face into its current form–but I could see how watching someone recite nonsense syllables for half an hour might bore some 21st Century Internet users accustomed to more visual stimulation.  I would bet, however, that without the visual signals saying “this is boring,” your ears might find the piece quite engaging.

Let me say that I know nothing of Dadaism and that until I clicked on the link I had never heard of the “Ursonate” or its creator, Kurt Schwitters, nor have I searched the Internet for other performances or writing about the poem.  I want to respond to it from my own experience, before I read about how others have experienced and analyzed it.

So, assuming I’m not the only person who finds it so, why does a thirty minute poem composed of made-up syllables hold one’s attention?  It’s the enjambment, of course!  Just kidding, I couldn’t help myself.  Enjambment is probably the only poetic device a nonsense poem can’t take advantage of.  It does, however, use many others, such as rhythm, repetition, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and consonance.  All of these make the poem aurally interesting, but what allows it to hold our attention for such a long period of time is its consistencies.

Even though the poem is composed entirely of made-up syllables, there are rules.  The syllables have a consistent sound (with the exception of the face-pulling, neck vibrating, buzzing sounds near the end!), as though they all belong to the same, single foreign language we have yet to learn (rather than from a dozen different foreign languages), and the syllables are finite in number and most of them are repeated.  It would, in theory, be possible to spend 30 minutes performing a string of made-up sounds and syllables that do not repeat and that sound distinctly different from each other. This might be an interesting challenge for the performer, but human brains seek patterns in chaos and with no discernible patterns, listeners would quickly bore.  In the “Ursonate,” however, one senses movement and emotion, as though you are being told a graphic story in a language you do not understand.  Watching it for the first time, I felt like a toddler who hadn’t yet learned to speak, trying desperately to grasp the meaning in the animated face and voice before me.  If I truly were a toddler, I can even identify the places where I would have begun to cry in fear, where I might have been soothed, and where I would have been excited enough to “dance” to the rhythm.

Anything completely made-up that has enough internal structure to make me feel safe and keep me interested for a long period of time and that can return me to a pre-verbal state of participation is pretty spectacular.  How often do we as adults encounter something like that?

So, goody for me, I got to have this experience.  But where I think this really could get interesting is if it were to become a collaborative experience.  When I work with kids to help them get in touch with their creativity, one of the biggest challenges, and the biggest goals, is to get them to express a first response to a stimulus, without planning their response in advance or censoring themselves to express an “appropriate” response.  It’s about spontaneity here–not, necessarily, originality.  This freedom is difficult to achieve, and so really needs to be practiced.  And, here, even though no one asked for it, is a spontaneous list of how I think someone could use the “Ursonate” with people of any age to practice spontaneity and getting in touch with their creative impulses:

Synesthesia Activities: The goal here is to inspire movement in response to sound.  These activities could be done with any group of two or more.  Full body: The group “performs” (a portion) of the “Ursonate” syllable by syllable with one person speaking a single syllable or word and the others immediately moving their bodies, spontaneously and without coordination between group members, in response.  One challenge might be to come up with a novel movement for each successive repetition of the same syllable; another challenge might be to remember and repeat the same movement each time the same syllable is repeated–both of these options require “thought before movement,” however, so if your goal is to help others get in touch with their first responses, skip these.  Brush strokes: A similar activity would be to have the group draw or paint in response to each syllable. Instead of moving their entire bodies, the participants would make one stroke with the pen or paintbrush in response as each syllable was spoken.  If large canvases or pieces of paper were hung on walls for the participants to mark on, this activity could be a combination dance/painting activity as the actors would have freedom to make large movements with their bodies.

Acting/Storytelling/Dance: Two or more people could divide the poem into parts, to make it feel more like a conversation.  For a larger group, the words and sections of the “Ursonate” could be analyzed by the participants and rated in terms of “action” and emotional temperature, such as scary, soothing, questioning, answering, motivating, sluggish, sad.  The group could then divide up and assign “parts” to subgroups and perform the “Ursonate” as though it were a musical piece being performed by various instrument sections or a play with actors and a chorus.  The actors might also choose to pair movements with the lines they speak, playing up the story aspects or emphasizing the musicality through dance.

Musical Notes: Each participant could be assigned a syllable that they will speak or sing each time it appears in the poem. The trick will be keeping everyone together and getting each member to speak their syllable on time.  To increase the creativity value, the group could agree on emotional values of various sections of the poem, so that each time a member said her line, she would have to say it in a manner in keeping with that section, thereby exploring the different meanings or emotions that can be expressed by a single syllable.  This could make a fun game, and if it could be accomplished with a fairly good tempo, it might be useful in a larger discussion of poetry or music in demonstrating the internal structure and musical or poetic elements of the piece.

There, I think I’ve said all I have to say about the video, why the poem works, and how it would be fun to explore it further with a group.  Now I’m free to go exploring the Internet and see what other people have had to say on the subject.  (Oh, I should also point out that Jaap Blonk’s memory, voice, and facial expressions are all incredible!  And mention that I could see my friend Tad performing this, or better (worse?) yet, I could see him creating this…conversations he had with our roommate Jim in college could have fairly easily sparked such a piece!  There, NOW I’ve said all I have to say.)  Any broader comments on internal logic in a made-up landscape will have to wait for another post.