April 1st 2010
4 days to go…..
The Sun is shining, and I mean really shining, it is the most beautiful spring day here. It was bitterly cold over night and stepping outside the door this morning the cold air bite into the skin on my face and hands. As I crossed the road to take my daughter to school the sun caught my face and I could feel the warmth from it and then as we walked down the path I felt its unmistakable warmth licking at the back of my legs and up onto my back. I paused for a moment and just enjoyed the sensation. It has been a long dark winter in the UK which has felt twice as long as normal I think by the fact that we didn’t really have any summer to speak of. Feeling the warmth of the sun on my body, even if it was through winter clothes and even if my nose was still freezing was a moment to savour.
As I walked on I could feel my mood lifting and looking forward to the day ahead and whatever it may bring. The past few days have been something of a rollercoaster ride both emotionally and physically. I feel like not only have I put my body through its paces at the gym but my emotions too. My emotions have sweated and my heart raced and my lungs tightened just as if I were on a treadmill, they have felt the burn just like my muscles do on the wave machine, biting and causing me to gasp as I have wrestled them and then I have taken my emotions and worked them like working the weights at the gym, steady, controlled but needing all my attention and strength to keep it so and just like with my body at the gym I have felt like giving up. Pressing the emergency stop button and getting off the treadmill and maybe slowly sinking into the hot tub instead, forgetting all about the pain and just admitting defeat…..I am not built for this surely, just leave me alone.
But then there is something else, something that allows me to keep putting one foot in front of the other, something that even in the darkest hours says to me…… ‘chin up girly, you can do this, now get of your fat arse and get on with it’ ……….and I do, I dig deep, whether its physically or emotionally and find that something, that reserve that I need to take another step forward, and then another and then another.
I didn’t know I was strong. When I pushed the self destruct button and left my ex husband I had no idea where it would lead me or what it would bring and I still don’t, not really, but I do know that it has bought me, well, me I guess. I have learnt so much about myself, my strengths, my weaknesses, and about others, about my family and my friends and who they really are and what they mean to me but mostly I have learnt that I am capable of much more than I ever gave myself credit for and the last week or so has shown me that all over again. I have dug deep people and found that something that allows me to take the next step and the next, one foot in front of the other, even though the treadmill appears to be spinning out of control I have stayed on it and kept on going. What that ‘something’ is I am not totally sure of, in seems to come from my ability to ‘take a moment’ on the tread mill and find that place in my mind that I need to be in, in order to push on even though everything seems to be wanting me to fall off. Maybe it’s the ability to have hope, or the ability to believe in myself and also in others around me, or my ability to trust in people to do what they feel they have to do, or my ability to believe that things are just meant to be and sometimes we have to throw things up into fates hands and just see what happens, or maybe it is just an inner strength, a courage of my convictions or a determination to survive NO MATTER WHAT.
Reading back now, I guess maybe it’s all those things and probably more that we cannot even begin to understand about ourselves and the power of the mind. What I do know is that today the sun on my face, the warmth it showed me, felt like a message, it felt like a promise, a promise of what is to come. A promise that although the days have been dark and cold and wet and grey things keep moving on and the sun is here today and it will warm us, both physically and emotionally. Tomorrow it may well be back to clouds and wind and rain and someone trying to push me off my emotional tread mill but for today, it’s a steady pace and I am ready for whatever comes next, the sun is shining and there is promise in the air…….. I wonder what it will bring.
Mollyxxx
