Developing new habits to reach greater heights

Everyone my age suddenly seems a little older, including me. This has been slowly dawning on me for a couple years, but really hit me when I was visiting family and friends back east over Thanksgiving.

I realized that the friends who used to smoke cigarettes around a campfire are smokers. My friend with the toddler is a mom, same as our own moms in the old photographs. My cousin is struggling to decide her next big life move, like she has since we were young.

Where I used to think, oh, this is a phase, now I think: This is life. Probably, the smokers won’t quit. My friend and I will grow old, and so will her adorable kid, who will someday look at old pictures of us and marvel at how young we looked in 2021. My cousin trying to wrestle with her future has always been like that, and will probably never stop.

I still consider myself and us young. But I have less of this sense of the future being wide open and full of promise, and more that the past tends to predict the future and I am surrounded by and full of my own patterns.

It sounds like a dour outlook, but actually it’s freeing. I have that sandpapered, weathered settled-ness that comes with a little bit of perspective in realizing that the life I have already lived was simply a series of moments and the life I have yet to live will be full of those, too. This gives me a lot of control over how I shape my future, since I have plenty of say in informing my “now.”

I still strive to be more and experience more. But I try to temper that with being right here to inhabit what I have.

One way this comes up is in my approach to being outside. Recently, I’ve been physically training, which is pretty normal for me. The difference is that right now there’s no race involved. There’s just a state I’d like to get to.

It’s something along the lines of, come spring 2022 I want to be able to easily hike and run a little higher and longer. I want my threshold for pure enjoyment to readily clear my threshold for physical discomfort, which — with steady training and strength building — I can achieve.

There’s no particular distance or activity I’m working toward. I just want to be as much at home and capable in my own body as I can be, within and following the next few months.

Essentially what I’m looking for is to be as much of me as possible. This is how I can deepen my own experience of the world. It’s a way of growing in and then, taking that capability to the road, out and up into places I haven’t been before.

I want to climb new mountains, or old ones in ways that feel new. I want to go for impromptu runs. I want to be able to say “yes” to adventures relatively casually, knowing that I’ll be up for the physical and mental challenge.

I thought about this on a long run through subzero temperatures and new, fresh snow. What was the distance? I’m not sure. I think it was between 7 and 8 miles. What was the purpose? It was both fresh air and exercise, and utility because I’d dropped the car downtown and needed to get home.

As I ran, I felt steady and capable. I never got that clawing, hungry, empty feeling that happens sometimes when I haven’t trained well enough for the distance or am undernourished. I didn’t feel very cold, because at this point I know how to dress. Overall, there really wasn’t much discomfort. It was more a sense of steady, meditative enjoyment as I jogged the path home, taking in the mountains as I went.

It took training to get to this place. It’s taken so many years of habitual running to learn everything I’ve learned, both muscle-memory and also psychological. My body and mind are stronger as a result.

I also have what my sister’s informed me are “11′s”: two parallel vertical lines between my eyebrows from squinting into the sun. I have crow’s feet from smiling, parenthesis around my mouth from laughing, and, and, and.

I’m good with all of these habits and I’m good with the marks they’ve left.

At some point in my life, through ingrained habits, I became a runner.

And, through running, I hope I stay trained to pay attention to moments “big” and small. That means training for and taking in races, sure. But it also means simply inhabiting my life, and seeing how that in turn shapes my future.

I like being older. I like this identity I’ve cultivated for myself, and that by seeing it for what it is, I can change course if and when I need to.