Good Morning Sunshine!

This is what greeted me Saturday morning. Do you recognize my own personal paradise? There is no mistaking it for me. There is nothing, nothing that can instantly start replenishing me better or faster than this natural salute as I step outside my door when I am here. It didn’t fail me yet again.

I was headed out for my 10K. I wasn’t sure I would. I had made it as near to impossible for me to attempt it as I could. I had not had a run in all of March. I decided I just wasn’t going to show up. I made myself think I didn’t even remembered how to run. I did my share of shrugging it off figuring if I did or didn’t I would still be at my personal paradise and what did anything else matter?

But I did show up and ran the entire race. I didn’t place; I didn’t run faster than I had this same race before. I even felt like I might have let some people I care about down by not doing things that only I might have thought they expected. No fault on them – shame on me.
But what I did was run it. What I did was thoroughly enjoy it. I ran smiling, watching a throng of seagulls take flight as they blended into a moving sheet of white as I past. I covered miles underneath a cool morning sun as it dropped sparkling gems into the calm waves to my left. I gave thumbs up to runners already returning from the half point turn-around and was rewarded with a palm slapping high five from another as we crossed the same path – me approaching; she already turned and headed toward the finish. A gesture offered to me by a stranger anywhere else except there on that road at that particular time.
Why would I miss this? There isn’t a good enough reason even for me to come up with and I shouldn’t have been trying. Sometimes I need to be batted over the head and am glad for all the non-nudges I may have gotten. It was well worth getting over my stubborn self and will only look for this same race again year after year. It holds too many treasures I would never get anywhere else. It starts with my morning greeting and continues all through the day.
Oh yes, and it also happens to be during the exact time of year for my personal after race lunch. Oh yes.

Good morning sunshine!
TT