Lemonade

Despite the optimistic assessment of my left knee that I made in my last post, I am still injured and still not running. Looked back on this last day of the year, my running life in 2009 was a disappointment: lost a week when I broke my rib in February, was down for five weeks in April after I fell and bruised the bursa in my left hip, and am currently biking, swimming, and going round and round on the elliptical trainer at the gym rather than running on real live roads the way I’d like to be.

So I enter 2010 with the wish that I’ll recover soon and run a lot. Along with this wish, however, there rises within me a wish of another, gentler stripe, and that is the Zen prayer, “May I be happy with whatever is happening.” In other words, may I be ever mindful of the joy of being alive. In other words—at the risk of descending irrevocably into cliché—may I learn to make lemonade from all those doggone lemons falling into my lap (or onto my knee).


Recent bike rides have been far from the worst activities I’ve ever forced on myself. Here I pose with my son the doctor, and below you see the latter with the indomitable Z. On a sunny Christmas day in LA we rode to the sea--well, to Marina del Rey, anyway.


And below is where I ended up biking on this very day, to Baxter Creek, which is at the end of the Ohlone Greenway, a trail oft-mentioned in this blog. The sky was blue with a few un-Berkeley-like puffy white clouds scudding across the welkin. (Who can resist the opportunity to say "scudding" and "welkin" in the same sentence? Not I!)


In many and various Decembers I have made many and various resolutions, most of which have gone the way of the days I made them on—that is, into the irretrievable past. One year Z and I went through a complicated and edifying process that was spelled out in the book Your Best Year Yet. Doing the work to create our to-do lists was exhilarating, but our mutual failure to follow through on virtually all fronts in the months that followed was not so exhilarating.

Since then I've felt a bit snakebit and have most often given a nod to the turning of the annual calendar by making promises to myself. Me: "I promise to be a better person!" "I promise to kick no puppies!" Or, as Mooch in Mutts says, "I resolve to eat more ice cream!"

What about this year? First, I offer gratitude to the cosmos for the life that I have. Second, I offer my intention to live this life as it is rather than as I manufacture it in my head. If I can do these two things, maybe I don't need a long and intimidating list. I mean if I can really do these two things.