Maintenance
Life is moving fast. The wedding is over, graduation has passed, the summer is coming to an end. I have an empty nest and a big move hovering. The timeline is shrinking. the boys will be gone soon and the house will be vacant. My next phase of life is about to blossom. In this moment I feel so distracted by the things that don’t matter. I get stressed out about slow traffic or a phone call. I get worried about my work day or not fulfilling my to do list. All of this keeps me from seeing the inevitable. I don’t know how to grasp the emptiness that is about to surround me. I find myself filling my days with things that don’t matter because when everything is quiet, the reality of what comes next is too big.
What if I don’t focus so big. What if I don’t think about what Christmas will look like this year, or what my schedule will look like next month. What if I looked at today and just know I will be able to completely dominate the day. What if I give myself little moments to dance or read or watch a little trashy tv. What if my workouts don’t have to be phenomenal, they just had to be solid. What if my nutrition doesn’t need to be social media worthy but just about feeling great throughout today.
Welcome to the world of maintenance, where for me, everything is good but nothing is great. It is a place where I take a deep breath and put aside my goals. It is a place where I give myself a break and a big hug. It is not a place I need to stay or a place I need to live. I just need to know how to access and remind myself I can always go when I need a reset. When I am in maintenance, the to do list is a suggestion, my workouts are about showing up and doing what feels right, and my walks calm my mind and move a little slower. This is my time, my place, to reset.
So much time is spent trying to be different, trying to be thinner, trying to be stronger, trying to be better. Goals become more abstract and more far reaching. So many of us take un-ideal body images and try to find ways to put our face on them. We find amazing feats of strength and wonder why we aren’t able to do them. We see the lives of others and compare our own. So many of us strive for the body we don’t have. Or strive for the vacations we can’t take. Or strive for the calm we can’t seem to find. Sometimes we need to give up on all of that for a little while and just take care of ourselves. Take care of our bodies and our minds.
Goals are great. Goals are something I spend a lot of time working on with people. I believe we need to keep growing, keep pushing ourselves. With that, we also need to spend time prioritizing the right now, the present. Maintenance is a space where I find we can work at just being. It can be one of the hardest places to be. Right now I am working on maintenance with my workouts and my nutrition. I show up and put the work in, but I have no goals. I am not willing to lose my strength but right now I don’t need to strive for anything bigger or better. My weight, my body, can always use a little tweaking. But right now I am pretty happy with the balance. I am not my leanest but I am enjoying my evenings with a glass of wine and popcorn. Its the balance and the acceptance. I also think of it as a place where we learn to accept. I am not my best or at my peak, but I am pretty fucking happy.
I am accepting the person I are in this moment. I am going to stay here for a little while. I am going to enjoy this space without the pressure to do more or be more. I don’t think we live enough of our lives in a state of maintenance. I can keep training hard and eating well and getting my shit done. I can keep walking my pups and spending my weekends at the Tacoma Humane Society. I can also relax and drink champagne on a Tuesday. I can look at myself in the mirror and say, today was a good day. My mind will always need to grow, and I will always need goals. But I can do a better job of accepting my failures as lessons and using my successes as momentum.
Maintenance is a hard place to be but probably a place most of us would like to live in. I have spent most of my life competing. I love the competition, I love the drive, I love focus and I fucking love to win. Finding calm amongst the drive is almost easier than I thought. It seems like so often we use maintenance as a failure. We feel like we have to be reaching for something or striving for something. But sometimes we just need to be.
In these quiet moments, there is space to process the big hurdles and obstacles that swallowed my time and energy. I can reflect on the bigness and the smallness of these experiences and process them as they need. I am not where close to a finished product. Every day I learn and grow, even if I don’t want to. Every day I can find failures in my actions and I am going to need to find forgiveness in myself. I am looking for ways to embrace growth and not look for perfection. This break from the pressure, this maintenance for life, is giving me the space for all of that and a little more.