My Former Self
I hopped on Facebook yesterday to check in with the world, and was instantly greeted by a picture of myself from 10 years ago. My “Facebook Memory” was of the Pear Blossom Run in April 2010, when the world was a 2010-kind of normal and I could run 10 miles. This is not the life I live now, and I was sad for a moment.
It’s been a year and a half since I’ve run any kind of distance, and most days I’m okay with that. I’m a walker now, sometimes a hiker; I do some power-stretching and I hold my gut in when I’m typing. It’s a new normal for me and my joints are thanking me, but I do feel the pull every spring. The sun comes out, the air is easy to breathe, and I remember my former self running the trails on the weekdays and hitting the country road for a long run on the weekend. I remember the runner’s high and the feeling of accomplishment, and I fondly recall the carbs. Oh the carbs.
But then I remember the aches, the injuries, the demand for consistency, and the worry about missing a run and losing ground.
Each month of this year I have made a handwritten calendar for our kitchen—white gel pen on black scrapbook paper. It was a great idea in December 2019. It’s a bit tedious now, but my favorite black calendar went out of print and I figured I could make do this way, using the monthly routine of making the calendar as a kind of meditation: what does the month ahead hold for us, and what will God do in these spaces? I consolidate our digital calendars and consult the wedding and shower invitations that come in, the birthdays for the month, the weekly meetings, and the holidays.
It’s April 16, 2020, and you know I just made April’s calendar a few days ago. For weeks I looked at the end of March, with its crossed-off events and cancellations, and figured there was no point in making April. Or, I could make the intended calendar with the planned and anticipated events, and then cross them off as a silent complaint. The month is half gone and possibly there’s not much point in a calendar these days (what day is it?!), but in the end I decided that April 2020 did deserve her own page. It’s my birthday month—Tim and I were going to visit a castle in Colorado, taking in the Imagination Redeemed conference together. I found a great deal on our flights and rental car, and two nights at Glen Eyrie wasn’t outrageously expensive. It was going to be amazing; but instead, I wrote the conference on the April calendar and penned “online” underneath, with thankfulness that we can improvise. I didn’t write the weekly meetings or the baby shower we’re missing, the end of the year programs for the two Classical Conversations classes I tutor, the coach’s conference, the college visit, or the Easter sunrise service. April is mostly straight lines and tidy numbers.
When I look back on April 2020 I will remember that life wasn’t normal and we missed things, and my digital calendar will keep track of them. But on paper, maybe I’ll look back and see my former self living with wide-open spaces on the calendar. I already plan margin into my life and I long ago got over the need to be busy, but I have learned to make appointments and schedule events, to have some things to look forward to and some things to stretch myself into. It’s a whole other level of discipline to look at all the unfinished things in my life and home and force myself to complete them, rather than going and doing other things in avoidance. Maybe I will write “finish the photo album” on the calendar.
When the stay-at-home mandate began for us, I admit that I thought having our weekly school classes online would be a welcome break. I love being home and I also love tutoring these high schoolers, so let’s combine the two and enjoy it! But Zoom is torture and exhaustion, even for introverts. This week we are switching platforms due to the very real fear of our Zoom meeting being hacked, and the process of figuring out a good alternative and telling my classes they had to download and learn another thing, brought literal tears to my eyes. I also cried four times on Easter Sunday—each time I listened to Molly Skaggs’ rendition of Ain’t No Grave. April has already met her quota of emotional breakdowns but this might be a record setting month.
I will look back on this time someday and evaluate how I did. I’ll look through my journals and photos, read old blog posts, and look at my calendar from spring 2020 and feel a bit of nostalgia, oddly. It’s a pandemic. Who feels nostalgia about a pandemic?
This is A Time, and I know we’re all feeling it differently. But we will be on the other side of this time someday and I hope our memories of our former selves are tempered with a thankfulness for our current selves. It’s neither all good, nor all bad.
Not that I have already attained, or am already perfected; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me.
Philippians 3:12 NKJV
