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Friday, August 3, 2012

Clean Ninja Slate


Stop. Start. Over.

Seems self-defeating to have to stop… just to start. In life…shouldn’t it be more about changing directions, or giving some stuff up and taking others on, not simply stopping and starting??? Don’t follow? Let me explain. I heard a great quote once that was referring to training and never giving up when working towards your goals, “If you don’t stop, you never have to start over”. It’s a bit paraphrased, but the idea is that you expend a lot of energy starting over and it can suck to start over because you never really get anywhere if you are always starting over. No matter how many times I start a training plan, if I keep starting over... it won’t get me to finish a race…so according to this motivating quote, if you just continued to keep trudging through it, overcoming obstacles and finding solutions to problems that arise, then you keep working towards your goal and you don’t stop and the result of that is that you will always have the forward motion to reward your efforts. And as long as you keep moving forward, even if it’s slowly, you are not falling behind, right?

Life, fate, God, whatever you may believe it was, just offered me the chance to stop and start over. A blessing in disguise? An expensive re-route? A dream finally come true? I’m not sure…but it’s a clean slate. I was trudging forward with relationships, work, a home, and other items toward a goal I wanted. Well a goal that was slowly being taken over and being made blurry by the things I was trudging. Not that they were bad and not that they were good things…they were things in the way…helpful some days, unhelpful other days…those were the things I needed to trudge through to feel the weight of life…to know that I was connected to others, to know that I have talents and gifts that amount to good in different facets of my life. When you are trudging through them all you can forget that they are not trying to force you to leave your goal behind, or to put it aside, but rather to show you that when you decide to follow that dream or to chase that medal at the finish line of a marathon, it’s because you chose it.

So, while the sentiment of “don’t give up”, “ keep pushing through it” is a positive enforcer that you should never quit and you should stick to the fight, I think wiping the slate clean, because you elect to or are forced to, can shed light onto how you are going to utilize your time, gifts, and energy. I ran the November half marathon in Seattle…I hurt myself. I kept running and training all with the pain in my leg/foot. I was able to do just enough to get me to be able to make it through the half marathon in May. But I ended up even more hurt and scared my running career was over than if i had stopped and regrouped. I was in so much pain and with a tight leg wrap for about a month completely unable to run. In essence I was forced to stop. Not cool.  But because I stopped I now have to start over with my training. And now as I sit in my running clothes I realized that if you never have the world force you to stop, you miss out on the opportunity to re-evaluate what you are trudging through. When it’s forced, when you have a weight limit on suitcases, when you have a dollar limit on your budget, when your bucket of feelings can only hold so much, you have to take in only what you value and you have to put out into the world only what you can give. So a better quote…more elaborate and less succinct but more honest and a better reflection of the true state of such complex beings that ninjas are, would be… “If you don’t [choose to] stop [and truly re-evaluate what you trudge through on the daily, the world will force it upon you], you never [have to give up everything at once to do so, but you always] have [the power and the tools] to start over”