Heavy

Tonight I am cranky. I haven't felt well all day. My mind is tired of all the political garb. My heart is heavy. My heart always feels heavier when my mind is tired. 

So tonight's post is for me. Tonight, I need my own daily scoop.

There is one trainer at my pilates studio who is brutal. She works me out hard. She pushes me to my limits. There are many times when I am doing the exercises she asks of me and about half way through the session my muscles begin to shake. They are so tired and worn that I cannot stop them from shaking. Other times I get to a point where my muscles simply will not do what I ask them to do. They are incapable of the movement required of them. 

At the same time, I have seen great growth in my strength and abilities as I have worked with this trainer. I can see my muscles taking more shape and there are exercises that I couldn't do at first that now I can do. All the while, we are increasing the difficulty and weight during our training.

Sometimes I feel that my life is like this. The weight of this grief seems constant on me. But week by week I am stronger. At first there were SO many things I simply could not do. They added weight to my load. But the longer I have carried this weight the more steady I feel under its weight. 

Still there are times when the stresses of life increase the difficulty or weight of my load by incremental degrees. Suddenly I am enormously aware of the entirety of the weight. There doesn't ever seem to be a time that I can put down the load and let my muscles take it easy. Some days it is all I can do to stand on my shaking legs and not allow them to buckle underneath me. 

I feel gimpy for the shaking. It is as if someone has just handed me a dictionary to hold and suddenly I am shaking under the weight. I could have carried a few dictionaries with ease in the days before. But my muscles are still so tired from the elephant I have strapped to my back that suddenly this dictionary seems unbearably heavy. And so I shake and eventually I give it away or drop it.

I guess I can try holding dictionaries later. For now I am only able to carry paper back books.

I am going to go soak myself in a tub and try to clear my mind of all the issues spinning themselves in circles in there. Maybe if I can clear my mind of extraneous worries, I can center myself once more. I can remind myself to breath in and out. I can remember to keep looking for the joy all around me and try to engage it in my life.