On “is this living?”
I was untethered. Anxious. My emotions on the edge of my skin for all to see, or so it felt at least. Last Monday marked eight months unemployed, and somewhere during the day, I started asking a quiet, uncomfortable question—one a friend put into words before I could. Is this living? Am I living, or just getting through? Isn't there more?
I share this carefully. As mentioned earlier, not to hand over my mess, but because I suspect I'm not the only one asking it right now. If you are as well—hi. You're not alone in this.
Here's what I know now that I didn't know, couldn't articulate, wouldn't acknowledge: "better" didn't arrive in a phone call or an email or a job offer. It came in ordinary hours I almost forgot to count, when in fact these are often the only hours that actually count.
I started training for the Army Ten Miler. I'm not the college runner I used to be—nowhere close—and I laced up anyway. It turns out you don't have to be your old self to be proud of one step in front of the other. A little sweat equity. A little proof.
I taught yoga. My regular weekly classes, my private clients, a bunch of subbed classes—and every room put me back inside the thing I love, side by side with other people on their mats, in their practices.
I hiked in Rock Creek Park and got so lost in the beauty that I added an extra thirty minutes I hadn't planned.
My niece was home from Germany, and I got to celebrate her—showing her my favorite corners of this city, seeing it new through her eyes.
And I said yes to an impromptu happy hour, which—if you know me, the scheduler—is nearly a miracle. A little spontaneity, it turns out, is good for me.
None of that was a distraction from the hard thing that's still there. But individually and collectively, they answered the "is this living?" question as the living themselves. The answer to my own uncomfortable question was hiding in plain sight—in the sweat and my niece's laugh and the drink I didn't plan. Sometimes the ordinary isn't the waiting room for life. Sometimes the ordinary is the whole of it.
“There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.”
There was another life I might have had—the faster runner, the surer season, the one where the job came months ago. But I am having this one. And this one, it turns out, has been alive the whole time.
So I'll keep lacing up. Slower than I was, proud of every step. One in front of the other. Nothing more, nothing less.
This one's mine. I'm glad to be in it—and glad you're here, too.