works of wanderlust

Tag: struggling with change

  • one foot out of the nest

    I’m sitting here in a cafe watching out the window as a parade of goslings march across the parking lot let by a gaggle of parent geese.  They navigate the mostly empty asphalt in front of a not-open-at-8am restaurant, and then a couple minutes later are dashing out onto the main drive holding up the cars and trucks on their morning commute out of the neighbourhood.

    It is an apt metaphor for the last twenty-four hours of my life, I realize.

    Yesterday evening we attended the first of two granduation commencement ceremonies for The Kid who will be—is—already technically has graduated high school this year.

    The first ceremony, the one last night, was a smaller and more intimate affair  with just the hundred or so kids who successfully completed the language immersion program and will be graduating next week with a French diploma.

    There were tearful parents, thousands of photos, cake, silliness, and congratulatory handshakes. 

    We’ll repeat it next week on a larger scale will the full class, but the fun one—the one where I knew enough of the kids who had been through all thirteen years of school, the one with the gaggle of parents were a big group of familiar faces from years of field trips, sleepovers, birthday parties, drop offs, pick ups, and on and on and on—that one is blip, and done.

    I’ve been thinking a bunch about parenting lately. I mean, for about five years, tho lost to the buried archives of time and privacy those articles are long gone, I actually wrote a parenting blog. It was not an advice blog. It was a reflective, parenting philosophy blog. It took me down some interesting paths of thought and ideas and implementation of both. If only I could go back in time and tell the guy writing that blog that simply overthinking all those ideas was worth it in the end.

    And then I wrote a parenting blog of another kind. For a couple of years I posted a weekly comic strip over at www.piday.ca which was me drawing art and making commentary on the trials and troubles of being a dad to a kid who was about ten years old when I created them. I literally just spent a few hours over the last week restoring all those comic strips to a new website and in doing so re-read every single one making me wonder why I ever quit making them. They were not great, but they were pretty good.

    In a week that same kid will be graduated.

    In mere months that same kid will cease to be a kid—in as much as she will be able to vote, buy booze and make decisions for herself.

    I definitely know that parenting never really ends, but this week… this month… this summer is definitely a major milestone in my parenting journey, maybe as consequential as I remember feeling about this time eighteen years ago.

    Those little geese will be off and out of the nest in a month or two. And then the parents can get back to doing whatever they do best—pooping in the grass and squwacking at bikes and honking at five in the morning as they take off into flight.  I feel you, you angry birds, I feel you.

  • accidental distances

    It was only a little accidental that I ran my longest run of the season yesterday. But heck, it wasn’t much to brag about either way: barely thirteen klicks all in.

    And barely one when it came right down to it.

    My running is not doing great these days. I mean, I have always had good seasons and bad ones. I’ve been tearing up the trails for going on eighteen years now so anyone is bound to have a roller coaster of ups and downs during that time, no matter who you are. Injuries have sidelined me for as long as half a year or more. Winters have often been scaled back. And race plans always seem to set the real tone of how my summers go: any time I’ve signed up for a marathon it would be foolishness not to focus on building endurance and strength and distance with every spare waking thought.

    My fatigue caught up with me in the last week, tho. I walked in our regular Thursday run because I was bagged. And then I started getting leg cramps overnight on the weekend that gave me at least one sleepless night laying awake hoping that the charlie horse in my calf didn’t startle me awake again. So, waking up Sunday morning I was barely fifty-fifty on going out for my regular run. I barely, just barely made it out for one. I ended up accidentally logging thirteen.

    I lack a coherent plan, I realize. 

    I have written quite a bit on my own distractable nature these days.

    I am trying to walk a creative path, trying to rebuild a professional self, trying to navigate a transitory phase of my parenting career, trying to stay optimistic in the normalized collapse of western democracy, trying to eat better, trying to read more, write more, be more, trying, trying, trying. 

    I’ve let my running take a bit role in the stage play that is my life this year.

    It turns out that I am recovering from an injury to my soul that I wouldn’t have thought would crack my running agenda but somehow that is one of the plainest examples of the damage.

    And oddly enough, the path back to the paths isn’t clearly one straight through forcing myself to just run more, dammit. Sure, it feels good for a bit when I do it, but there is something bigger going on in my deepest self that I haven’t quite figured out, and it seems as though might need a bit of work on those aches and pains before the deeper trails clear out for me.

    We ran down into the river valley yesterday morning, down the big hill towards the footbridge under the freeway bridge, along the path budding with spring green, basking in the glow of the May sunlight and still-fresh air and the cool breeze that made it almost perfect for a morning run. We ran out to meet the other half of the crew who had started on a longer training loop an hour before us, ran to meet them and run back to home with this little cadre which after all seems like the whole point of it all lately. Ran and ran and ran, further than any of us had planned when we set out. A little accidental, and not much to brag about, but the longest run of the year for me, the longest run in a year when something is seeming to be gnawing at my feet and holding me back.

    No coherent plan, after all. Distractable and accidental.

    Recovering, but uncertain, unsteady. Not great.