7 Weeks Remaining
June 1 is not creeping up slowly, it’s racing faster than I could ever pedal. The training has been going well and my leg muscles are growing in some parts and creating weird indentations in others. It’s strange when your body parts change shape. It’s like having a new pair of hard pants, and I keep hoping no one catches me feeling up my strange new thighs. The rides are still hard, but the progress has been phenomenal. I wasn’t feeling so well last week and missed an important training ride. But my legs didn’t deflate and I didn’t beat myself up about it. We keep going, right? (See? It's not just my legs that have grown!)In the spirit of keeping going, I’ve been back on track with the happiness work and have meditated, exercised, gratituded, journaled, and kindnessed my way through the past couple of weeks. If I miss a day, I feel horrible. When I’m back on, I feel better. Funny how that works. Even funnier is needing the constant reminders. Humans, eh?But if you’ll recall, one of the big realizations from the initial 30 days was the addition of a 6th task – every day you should work on the thing that you love. For me that is writing. When I was blogging everyday, that task was built in. Now that I’m posting once every couple of weeks this one has suffered a lot of starts and stops.After one of those starts, I sent out a few works to some publications and every one of them got rejected. I’ve been at this long enough to be used to it, but for some reason it harder this time, and that awful little demon voice came in to tell me I suck and should give up. So I did. And when I did, I imagined my life without it – never putting fingertips to plastic ever again, never hearing the tick-tick-typing of hard-fought creativity. It felt enormously depressing, despite the meditating, exercising, gratituding, journaling, and kindnessing. But the demon told me I sucked, so it had to be. But then a wonderful thing happened. I found myself in a position where I had to defend my writing. Out loud. To someone other than my demon. And some sleeping writerly tiger inside me finally woke up and roared, “I’m a writer!” And that cliché came to mind about loving something and setting it free. I set mine free for a week. But then someone asked me where it went, so my writer tiger leapt up to successfully hunt it down.