Al Hurr

I have nothing to write. I’ve been rolling ideas around in my head and my thoughts are just fragmented and kind of shy. They skitter away the minute I pay attention and try to figure out where they might take me. They don’t seem to want to take me anywhere. Just teasers.

I sat for an hour and a half with my coach yesterday spilling lots of things at her I don’t think she expected for the session, and I love how somehow she managed to get all the weird little parts together and set me a very challenging assignment. She said, everyday you pick one victim and spill one quirky thing about yourself to them. That way, she said, you can shut your saboteur up and kill that ego that’s been standing in your way for so long. I accepted the challenge and started wondering who that could be, and surprisingly some opportunities did present themselves. I got an unexpected phone call from an old friend in Qatar, but the conversation was way too sober for me to suddenly do that. Or maybe once again, my ego took over like it always does.

I could actually finish the entire assignment of the week in this one blog post and spill it out to the world at once, but it wouldn’t be too well constructed. I’d be taking you from bad energy and evil spirits to mysterious scents and a little unseen lump in my knee that I think is bone cancer. Why would you wanna go there? Or why would I take you there and risk my image as a sane, composed person?

Before that session began I thought to myself I had nothing to say to her. I wasn’t doing anything in the direction she was taking me. It was a very distracted week. But I decided that I was going to show up anyway and say whatever the hell comes to my mind. Just as I’m doing now.

We get so many moments in our lives where motivation goes down to a little below zero. You stop and start wondering what the point is. You’ve been doing this for so long over and over and nothing ever happens. But I realized that things don’t happen suddenly, they tiptoe in one tiny step at a time you have to step back and see the larger picture to realize they’re here. They also don’t happen because of how well we do things or whether or not we’re able to perfect our performance. They happen because of our persistence. On some workouts I move with the speed of pregnant turtle. My body feels so heavy, so goddamn heavy I look and feel clumsy and I get driven to tears in the middle of the workout but I don’t stop. OK sometimes I do, but it becomes a very dark day so I try to avoid that. I just realized that I have to start letting go of my obsessive desire to do things right, or even ever reaching my goal. I lower my expectations and I persist. Doing things out of habit always makes me feel grateful that I showed up, because I feel better at the end of the session of whatever it was I was supposed to be doing.

So here I am challenging my ego and the evil annoying editor looking behind my shoulder and snickering as I write this. I don’t even know why I called this an “art.” Actually I do, I couldn’t think of any other word. Maybe it is an art although now it just hit me. It’s more of a struggle, really. The Struggle of Showing Up? Nah. “Art” is prettier.