Hey there, Reader!
Last week, I was doing a 45 minute power zone endurance ride with Christine D’Ercole on my Peloton, and she said, “In my world, the shoe always drops.” I nodded and thought, me too.
Then, I chided myself for being so pessimistic.
I closed my eyes and continued riding, sweat unrelenting and lost myself in the music for a few minutes.
But then it hit me—the shoe always drops, in her world, in my world, in your world. That’s not pessimism; it’s reality.
The problem is that our societal programming continuously bombards us with messaging that if we only do this thing then we’ll have our dream lives. The shoe won’t drop! But that’s a lie.
We can do all the things—manifest, get therapy, work with a coach, set goals, and achieve them, AND the shoe will still drop.
That doesn’t mean that we can’t have the life of our dreams.
Life is the shoe dropping. It’s the inexplicable joy we experience. And it’s everything in between.
We can’t shield ourselves from difficult circumstances. We can make every “right” decision and challenging things can still happen. Natural disasters, the company that employs us going belly up, the person that we’ve committed our lives to suddenly leaves, our loved one dies, and the list goes on.
These things are going to happen whether our ducks are in a row or not, and we’re fooling ourselves to think otherwise.
We can’t avoid the “falling apart” in life. Life is a series of ups and downs. We can’t stay up forever, just like we won’t stay down forever. Rising above the low points takes work and effort that can feel insurmountable when we’re in it, but it’s possible.
Instead of foreboding joy, fretting when the shoe will drop, and beating ourselves up when the hard things happen, what if we asked ourselves, what can we do to be prepared to weather the storm? What can we do now that will equip us to get through the hard things with even a smidgen more grace and ease?
I want to share a story with you. I got COVID-19 for the first time in July 2020. It nearly killed me. This isn’t an exaggeration. I lost a third of the functioning of both lungs, developed pericarditis, and a whole host of hormonal issues.
My most trusted doctor that helped me reach some kind of normalcy in the aftermath said to me, “I believe you would have died if you didn’t have the level of fitness you did when you got COVID.” That seemed a bit dramatic. He explained the damage that was done to my body would have been fatal if I didn’t have a healthy baseline. All the working out, riding my Peloton, doing races, and hiking up mountains saved my life.
I’ve never identified with the term athlete. That’s something that was reserved for people with much greater skill and finesse. I’m just someone that had a career that required me to maintain my fitness if I wanted to be capable of saving my life or someone else's. Along the way, I found that I loved to challenge my body. What a gift.
One of my biggest struggles since 2020 has been feeling fit and healthy again. My body composition has changed. Workouts that were once easy for me, I still struggle with to this day.
The struggle isn’t an indication to stop. If anything, it’s been a reminder to keep going.
I’ve done numerous other endurance events since 2020, and all of them have been challenging, even more so than they would have been prior to 2020. That’s not easy to sit with.
I wanted to “bounce back” or come back stronger, but what I really needed was to come to terms with my new normal and stretch myself from that point rather than my original baseline. What. A. Struggle.
The struggle is worth it because I have already seen that pushing myself, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when I don’t feel like it can be lifesaving. This is just one example.
On a different note, I often tell friends, clients, really anyone that will listen, that journaling has saved my life throughout my life. If I didn’t pour out the mental anguish onto the page and give it a place to go outside of myself, I don’t know that I could have gotten through some of my hardest times.
When you give the words space outside of you, they lose their power inside of you. At least that has been my experience.
This isn’t meant to be preachy or get you to beat yourself up about all the things you’re not doing for yourself. It’s simply to get you to consider, how prepared am I for the shoe to drop? Whatever the shoe might be.
Do you have the physical and mental capacity to weather any storm? The storm may batter the hell out of you while you’re in it, but do you know in your bones that you will get through it?
If not, consider making 2025 the year that you become more prepared, more resilient, more adaptable.
Endurance events aren’t required to become more resilient. A creative practice, meditation, walking one mile every day, or journaling regularly might be your thing.
You decide what works for you. But decide and commit. It just might save your life.
When you can weather the storm and figure out how to adapt in any circumstance, there isn’t anything you can’t create in your life.
With love,
Adrienne
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In the midst of grief? Check out my book, Scattered Thoughts on Loss: Grief Haikus. Available here on Amazon.
