At age forty-four, I am running more than ever.
It happened accidentally. I’m not training for anything–which is what’s usually required to get me to push beyond my ordinary limits. And the weather is warming up, which typically cuts my runs short (and may still). Also, I run the same route on every outing, which can lead to burnout.
Finally, I am old. Older than I’ve ever been, in fact.
So it doesn’t make sense. Which is usually when, somehow, things make the most sense, upon deeper inspection. Three times a week, I tie my laces and do my stretches and set out from my front door on a path that has been mine for a year and a half now: a path strewn with harbours and boats and hills and beaches; a path that used to end far closer to home than it does now before it loops back to where it began. To home.
I’ve pushed it bit by bit, or maybe it’s beckoned me bit by bit. First, further down the concrete footpath. Then, down the looping hill toward the wharf. Then, to the crosswalk that connects to a side street. Then, emerging from that street onto the beach and its seaside path to the other beach and back again.
I’ve listened to music, then different music, then stories, then other words. I’ve watched the sun emerge, spilling light into darkness until the darkness was gone, and I’ve watched the same sun hang low in the sky but high enough to make me squint until it was at my back.
I’ve seen indescribable beauty, and all of it while I struggled to keep going.
We’ve been here in Australia nearly five years, a half-decade making memories that constitute the bulk of what resides in the boys’ brains now. This morning, one of those memories popped up on social media: the video of when The Kid’s therapist asked him to be in her wedding. Two days ago, she came over so we could meet her newborn son.
Yesterday, I knocked on the door of a house I’d been to once before, for a coffee with several of the school mums. This time, I was meeting with the new owner of the house, the mum of an autistic son who will be starting at the boys’ school next year. We were put in touch by a mutual friend and I told her about our first day, when I hadn’t known anything, and how I’d had to creep back onto the classroom porch to leave the recess snack I hadn’t known was required, and how I’d heard TK crying in the classroom.
I had felt so helpless, so in the dark in those days before the light crept in. I always seem to forget that it never stops showing up, until I remember. Until a memory tells me so. We’ve been here before. And it has always been okay. Eventually.
These revisitations are the language of grace’s faithfulness. “Do I have to go in?” TK asked me on his first day back to school last week. I nodded, reluctantly, and that answer somehow seemed to set him free. He pushed forward, reluctantly. Today, Little Brother bounded off toward his classroom like he always does, then I looked up and he was coming back, hesitation marking his features. He wouldn’t say why–yet–but coming back helped him, in some unspoken way, to push forward again.