I was talking with a good friend who is feeling suffocated by the burdens of holding down a really demanding job while parenting her kids. As a mom, she understandably feels very responsible for her children, not just in the general sense, but right down to the smallest details of the homework schedule, the meal planning, the extra-curricular activities and everything else that goes into the logistics of keeping a household running. However, compounding the universal responsibilities that we all face as parents, she also has a very demanding job with very little support where she is literally on call, via phone and email, around the clock for her clients. She has always tried to maintain a running routine and is a marathon finisher, but lately, the constant barrage of day-to-day responsibilities has taken its toll and her running and fitness routine has been abandoned for quite some time now.
Sometimes, the effort it takes to hold on to a training and racing schedule makes us tight. And I don't mean "tight" as in tight muscles; I mean that it makes us tight emotionally as we struggle to balance the demands of our training and our racing with the demands of family, friends, work, sleep and nutrition. We live pretty overloaded lives, so it is easy to look at training as a luxury as we struggle to hold on to all of the different strands of our life. Often, when we are pressed, our training routine is the first to suffer as we load up all of our "must do" items and load up ourselves in the process.
This is tragic because when our fitness routine gets lost, our ability to cope with all of the demands upon us suffers. It is no secret that a daily exercise routine is a great stress-reliever and keeps us calmer, fitter, happier, healthier and more adaptable people. So what do you do when you are holding on too tight to all of the responsibilities that are wearing you down? Typically, when we face that situation, we squeeze harder in our efforts to hold on to everything for which we feel responsible. Ironically, however, the harder we struggle to hold on, the more we fear and feel that things are slipping right through our fingers.
This feels like, and often is, the case because we hold on primarily to grant us the comforting feeling of control over our circumstances. But control is an illusion since, if we are to be very honest with ourselves, we can acknowledge that the only thing that we can ever control is ourselves. So as we squeeze tighter and tighter and neglect our own core needs more and more, we attract the opposite of what we are seeking. In our efforts to control, we lose control and the things we worry about holding onto the most slip right through our fingers.
When you feel this happening to you imagine that you are trying to hold on to water from a faucet. When you gently cup your hands, you can collect the water and sip it from your cupped hands. But when you try to hold on tight, you cannot. The water will just slip through your fingers. Water is so often an apt metaphor for our lives. Although we cannot control the flow of our lives, we can be mindful to avoid grasping and trying to control things, and try to go more with the flow, cupping our hands gently to hold onto what is important, and accept that doing our best is always enough -- both for us and for those whom we love.
Be gentle in holding on to what is important in our lives.
Our fitness routine helps us go with that flow by keeping us calmer and happier and providing some important self-care so that, in providing some appropriate focus on ourselves, we can be at our best to provide focus for those whom we love.
And as for my friend? She told me that she was going out for a morning run. She said that it wouldn't be long and it wouldn't be fast, but that she was going to go do it. And as for her responsibilities -- well, I'm sure that they didn't go away. But I sincerely hope that the burden of doing her best to meet her responsibilities felt just a little but lighter.