I'm never one to plan my future. I'm not reckless about my future or anything--I just have no idea what it's going to be. People always ask questions like, "where do you see yourself in 5 years?" or "how long will you stay in your apartment?" or "do you want to stay in Boston?" and my answer is always the same: "I have no idea," "I guess I'll stay until I don't like it anymore," etc.
I think it's because when I look far into the future I get stressed out about all the things that I'm going to have to do to get myself there, and it all seems so daunting--but then I realized over the years that thinking about things is the scariest part, and when you're actually there doing the things you anticipated yourself doing, it's really not so bad.
It's like when someone tells you about getting their fingers slammed in the car door. When they're telling you about it, you squirm in your seat, maybe feel a little sick to your stomach, sub-consciously grab hold of your precious fingers and hope it never happens to you...
But then it does happen to you. You scream, yell a few obscenities, take some advil, and move on with your life. You find a way to deal with it because you have to. It's what's on your plate at that given moment and you have to take it.
Thinking about writing my senior thesis in college was one of the scariest things of the first half of my college experience. I would hear seniors complaining, slaving away for hours in the library, crying in their adviser's office etc. And I was horrified. Until I actually wrote my thesis. And I was fine. And I didn't cry. I spent a lot of time in the library but so did everyone else, so it was fine.
For me, I feel like the best way to live my life, or at least to view myself living my life, is in small chunks of time. So that is how I always do things. I keep my head down, and just keep doing what I'm doing and all the sudden I look up and a year has gone by. And I never feel like it's wasted, because I took every day as it came to me, and I did what I wanted with it. If something needed to change, I changed it. If it could stay the same, I kept it the same.
This is how I think of all the smaller components of my life now too, because I find it much less daunting. When I go out for a run, or to do a workout, I never think of the workout as a whole. If I do, I inevitably fall apart.
Say I'm going out for 7 miles...I start off telling myself to just do 4, and we'll figure out the last 3 when we get there. When I get to mile 2 and my legs hurt because I did absolutely no warm-up before this run, I tell myself to only think of the next 2 miles...not the next 5. Because, like I said before, we'll figure out the last 3 when we get there. So then I finally get to the last 3, and then depending on how I'm feeling, I'll split it up 2 and 1. Just get through these next 2 miles, and then anyone can run 1 mile...it'll be easy! If I find myself sucking wind and wishing I could stop, then I break it down into even smaller pieces. Now I'm just thinking about the next mile ahead of me. Still too daunting? Ok. The next 800 meters. Still no? Alright, just run until the next driveway. Ok good, now the next driveway...and the next...until the driveway I get to is finally my own.
This mindset isn't always foolproof. It's hard not to try to peek into your future every once in awhile. Last Sunday on my 7 mile run I quite literally spent the entirety of the last 3 miles of the run wondering how the hell I'm ever going to run 13.1 miles on September 30th if I can't even do 7 without wanting to stop. So that wasn't really encouraging. Once I caught my breath after the run, I regained sight of the fact that I can just do those 13.1 miles like I do everything else. 4 miles at a time, or 2 miles at a time, or a half mile at a time, or by bribing myself with beer and junk food at the finish line. I'll figure it out when I get there. I'll continue to train to make sure I'm prepared to run without collapsing, but so much of how you perform on a race day has to do with how your mind is that day. Will it be a day that you can look at 13.1 and see 4+4+2+2+1+.1? Or will it be a day when you look at 13.1 and just see 13.1?
This post ended up more about running than I thought it would. But I'm glad it did because it demonstrates how I don't plan really plan for things. Every single week I think to myself for at least a quick second "what if I run out blog topics?" "what if I can't think of one for next week?" But then I remember that I thought the same thing last week, and the week before...and at this point last week, this post that I'm writing today hadn't even crossed my mind. So the same thing will probably happen next week with a new topic. Things always work out like that...we find a way to make them work out.
"I live my life a quarter mile at a time. Nothing else matters: not the
mortgage, not the store, not my team and all their bullshit. For those
ten seconds or less, I'm free."
-Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel), Fast and the Furious
(I tried so hard to avoid this quote at the end of this post...but I just couldn't let it go.)
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