End of longest week
It's Saturday at last, but although the people I work with will use that as a motivator ("Tomorrow's Friday!), weekends aren't much easier for me than weekdays. They are also busy. We have two soccer games and a volleyball game to attend, and my house is so chaotic and messy is unnavigable. I'm still so far behind in grading. Saturdays are a little more relaxing than other days because here it is 6am, and instead of being on my way to work, I've picked up the kitchen and am sitting with a cup of tea, but they aren't as relaxing as people make them out to be. If I'm not working, I'm always somewhat conscious that I should be. Like right now. And the only down time is before everyone else wakes up.
I did 14 3-minute intervals Wednesday at dusk as the rain was falling and the mist was rising off the path. That's the most I've run in probably a year. It was a stillness moment. Yesterday I ran 11 of them in bright sunlight at 4pm. Seeing as I started my run two days and a couple of hard things more tired, I'm OK with that. My back is not worse, or not clearly so. All of the muscles in my body between my neck and my thighs are tight and achy, but I think I can attribute that more to stress than to running since the muscles in the middle of my back are complaining as much as the ones below where the "injury" is. It's not the kind of pain that buckles my muscles and makes me fall. That's the kind I really hate. My nerve-damaged leg is whining some and twitching lots, but I can live with that too. The best thing is that I've turned the corner into wanting to run again today. I just know I shouldn't. I think I need to put 1-3 days of between runs. I'm also really loving the run/walk combination thing for mindfulness purposes. I can pay close attention to my breath for the three minutes of running and then I can pay close attention to my surroundings for the minute of walk. It's good.
I feel like this was the longest week I've lived in a long time, but maybe I say that every week. It makes my courage waver to think maybe every week could be so hard. We had Halloween and all of the extra hoopla and craziness with that and all of the time that can't be spent doing what needs to be done. Then there were grades due anyway just afterwards. Then there was no sleeping because of Cubs. Then a third of my students were absent Thursday, so I had to rearrange lesson plans on the fly, and half were missing yesterday, not because they were at the parade, all of them, but because they decided that since other people weren't coming they wouldn't either. So I had to change all of my lesson plans again. And of course, all of the people there wanted to do nothing and were whiny about it. (I just do not understand the desire to sit in class and not learn. As both teacher and student I find that miserable. If I'm going to do nothing, let me be outside. If I'm going to be stuck in a room, let me learn something! Also, I don't understand why kids want only to do things they already know how to do. What would be the point? And how boring! OK, off soapbox.) Now we're almost a week behind where I thought we'd be just two weeks ago. Then there will be major whining that we're going too fast, that there's too much homework, etc etc etc because teenagers willfully forget that they had no homework this week or homecoming week or....
OK, I'm taking trains of thought I should avoid. My mindfulness practice this week is to explore difficulty. I want not to, partly because I want not to think about it and partly because I'm worried that thinking about it, even with this strategy won't help. I don't feel confident enough in my ability to meditate to handle this. I fell apart in the writing center yesterday and had to use someone's office to calm down. Yet another hard thing about being in a school is there isn't a single private place in the whole damn place. If you just need a moment alone, tough. But on meditation, I'm not supposed to judge myself about it, which is hard for me, and my office neighbor says from his really limited perspective I seem to be getting better. It's true that my drop-down pain doesn't hit at school very often anymore--maybe it gets me when I pick up my heavy bag once a day or so. It's definitely better. That scary pain is mostly only in the evening now.
To top off the week came some very very bizarre and sad news. My sorority sister, Rhonda, flew to Spain to be with her husband who, on a two-week vacation, experienced some minor strokes. He was released from the hospital, and just as Rhonda hung up from making travel arrangements back to the States, she fell. One side of her face was dropping, and her speech was slurred. They rushed her back to the same hospital her husband had just been in and found that the cranial pressure was continuing to build. They tried to break up the clot, did a craniotomy to relieve the pressure, and gave her muscle relaxants and other drugs to try to help, but apparently the end result was that all of those were ineffective, and Rhonda is in a coma with almost no chance of recovery. So sad and strange.
I did 14 3-minute intervals Wednesday at dusk as the rain was falling and the mist was rising off the path. That's the most I've run in probably a year. It was a stillness moment. Yesterday I ran 11 of them in bright sunlight at 4pm. Seeing as I started my run two days and a couple of hard things more tired, I'm OK with that. My back is not worse, or not clearly so. All of the muscles in my body between my neck and my thighs are tight and achy, but I think I can attribute that more to stress than to running since the muscles in the middle of my back are complaining as much as the ones below where the "injury" is. It's not the kind of pain that buckles my muscles and makes me fall. That's the kind I really hate. My nerve-damaged leg is whining some and twitching lots, but I can live with that too. The best thing is that I've turned the corner into wanting to run again today. I just know I shouldn't. I think I need to put 1-3 days of between runs. I'm also really loving the run/walk combination thing for mindfulness purposes. I can pay close attention to my breath for the three minutes of running and then I can pay close attention to my surroundings for the minute of walk. It's good.
I feel like this was the longest week I've lived in a long time, but maybe I say that every week. It makes my courage waver to think maybe every week could be so hard. We had Halloween and all of the extra hoopla and craziness with that and all of the time that can't be spent doing what needs to be done. Then there were grades due anyway just afterwards. Then there was no sleeping because of Cubs. Then a third of my students were absent Thursday, so I had to rearrange lesson plans on the fly, and half were missing yesterday, not because they were at the parade, all of them, but because they decided that since other people weren't coming they wouldn't either. So I had to change all of my lesson plans again. And of course, all of the people there wanted to do nothing and were whiny about it. (I just do not understand the desire to sit in class and not learn. As both teacher and student I find that miserable. If I'm going to do nothing, let me be outside. If I'm going to be stuck in a room, let me learn something! Also, I don't understand why kids want only to do things they already know how to do. What would be the point? And how boring! OK, off soapbox.) Now we're almost a week behind where I thought we'd be just two weeks ago. Then there will be major whining that we're going too fast, that there's too much homework, etc etc etc because teenagers willfully forget that they had no homework this week or homecoming week or....
OK, I'm taking trains of thought I should avoid. My mindfulness practice this week is to explore difficulty. I want not to, partly because I want not to think about it and partly because I'm worried that thinking about it, even with this strategy won't help. I don't feel confident enough in my ability to meditate to handle this. I fell apart in the writing center yesterday and had to use someone's office to calm down. Yet another hard thing about being in a school is there isn't a single private place in the whole damn place. If you just need a moment alone, tough. But on meditation, I'm not supposed to judge myself about it, which is hard for me, and my office neighbor says from his really limited perspective I seem to be getting better. It's true that my drop-down pain doesn't hit at school very often anymore--maybe it gets me when I pick up my heavy bag once a day or so. It's definitely better. That scary pain is mostly only in the evening now.
To top off the week came some very very bizarre and sad news. My sorority sister, Rhonda, flew to Spain to be with her husband who, on a two-week vacation, experienced some minor strokes. He was released from the hospital, and just as Rhonda hung up from making travel arrangements back to the States, she fell. One side of her face was dropping, and her speech was slurred. They rushed her back to the same hospital her husband had just been in and found that the cranial pressure was continuing to build. They tried to break up the clot, did a craniotomy to relieve the pressure, and gave her muscle relaxants and other drugs to try to help, but apparently the end result was that all of those were ineffective, and Rhonda is in a coma with almost no chance of recovery. So sad and strange.