Thursday, April 16, 2015

Running into the Sun

My son is sick. I'm not sure what he has, but since he's already on antibiotics from the ear infection he had last week, I'm going to guess it's a virus and we just need to wait it out. He missed his wax museum performance. Poor kid. After he was sent home on Tuesday with a fever and sore throat, I put in for a sub on Wednesday and stayed home with him. Staying home with a feverish Adam is not a hard task, and, as a bonus, it meant that I could run at 6am with the sunrise. As I was running up a hill on a grass trail with the sun directly in front of my face at the top of the hill, it seemed like life was just about perfect. 

But life isn't perfect--mine or anyone else's. I was there because my kid was sick. That's not perfect. I can no longer run as much or as fast as I want to, and I'm facing the fact that this is a permanent condition. I have degenerating vertebrae, and they aren't going to grow back. I'm only going to get older. Older, if my grandmothers are any example, means dementia and total loss of mobility. Then there are other things about life that aren't perfect. I have students with unpleasant attitudes and even worse home lives. I have more to do than I could possibly accomplish even if I didn't sleep at all for the next three weeks. But at least I have my job. I know people who have lost their jobs and people who can't get jobs in the first place. There are people who have lost their homes to debt or disaster. There are people born with physical deformities and mental disabilities. There are people with terminal illnesses and people who are paralyzed in car crashes. There are people who lose their children in tragic accidents or from horrible childhood diseases. I could list thousands of horrible things that people endure, but the short version of what occurred to me as I was running down the other side of the hill is that every morning when you wake up, you have no idea what is going to happen. Is this the day you lose your job, lose your beloved, make a bad decision, survive a tornado, die in a car crash, or suffer a stroke or a freak heart attack? It seems like the list of terrible things that might come out of nowhere is greater than the list of wonderful things. And yet, I thought, as I rounded the corner to overlook a small lake, I am happy to be alive and to see what I can see. 

I am willing to wake up every morning, even knowing that anything could happen. At the very least, life is pretty interesting. And so in spite of all of the ugliness and pettiness and brokenness one is sure to encounter sooner and later, it still seems worth the risk to get up every day and keep an eye out for the beauty. Just in case. 

And then, a good 250 yards from the lake, I started running through piles of fish. I'll just leave that there.