Last night I did something radical.

I couldn’t take it anymore.

I pulled out my workout playlists on YouTube.

Ah, exercise. My fierce nemesis.

We visit on occasion. We laugh, we have fun. We make summer plans and swear this time we are going to stick to our plans and actually remember to call each other when we said we would.

But she is a fickle friend, and I am left hurt and in tears too often to want to pick up the phone again.

Nevertheless, I gave her a rang last night.

“Hey girlfriend! What’chu doin.”

“Oh, nothing. Just sitting here on YouTube, chillin.”

“Cool, cool. Well, I was kind of thinking of..”

“…Yeah??”

“I was kind of thinking of pulling out some of those stretching videos for tonight. What do you think?”

“YES!! Let’s do this! Do you have your yoga pants on? Do you have your yoga mat? Do you need a block for this? What about cucumber water. Do you have cucumber water?”

“Woah, woah, woah there cowboy…I’m in my PJs and I’m just doing some stretching on the floor. We’ll just start with that.”

*breathes* “Okay. Okay, how about this one for your legs. Got it all ready for you. You ready?”

“Ready.”

I’m never ready.

But I did it anyway.

What I found was….some bits of paper under my bed. And a fuzzball of cat hair on the carpet under my nightstand. And some other teeny bits of stuff in the carpet that I picked out and put into a teeny pile.

I think maybe you’re supposed to clear your mind when you are doing stretches, or just focus on the now, or even concentrate on what you’re stretching so you don’t end up stretching something the wrong way or something.

I don’t know. Because it is so hard to turn my brain off.  It is a struggle every second of every day for me, because I have a million ideas relating to everything on every topic regardless of whether or not it is even relevant to what we’re doing, or what I am supposed to be thinking about at the time.

So, you could say that the boundaries I have put around me like bulkheads keeping the tide flowing where it should be flowing instead of up the hill or into a yard or across a freeway or down a mountain, are feats of unimaginable strength of self-control.

And this summer I have had a very focused flow. Mostly toward “rest” and “reenvisioning” and trying to figure out where I wanted to be for the future. Lots of meta thinking or lots of staring out into the forest just enjoying the sun.

However.

Summer is almost over. It is time to slowly stretch back into work.

 

“If you don’t break your own standards, you will not reach new heights and levels. It is by stretching our limits that we move beyond boundaries.”

― Israelmore Ayivor

This morning I woke up before 7.

I got some coffee, I turned on some lights, said good morning to the kids who are always awake before me for some darn reason, sat down at my desk and got started on some ideas to work with this week.

There are seasons for rest, and there are seasons for work.

I think my summer of rest is over, and it’s time to stretch back into work.