Thursday, May 26, 2011

Hello, God? It's me, exercising

For the last few months(!), I've been planning to start running and meditating. I've done little of either. Yesterday, my practical, supportive, husband suggested that I put my guided meditation CD on an iPod and do both at the same time.


I was doubtful, but today I remembered that I do have an old MP3 player, and I decided to give it a try. I'm pretty sure that I was procrastinating doing something else at the time, but anyway, the old MP3 player worked and I was able to put the guided meditation file on it.


In the process I discovered some old photos on the MP3 player, including the only ones we have of our son's baptism. I look about a million years old in the baptism photos. I was wearing clothes that were two sizes too big, since breast-feeding had temporarily sucked all the fat out of me. And I was in beige from head to toe, except for hot pink lipstick apparently applied in a moving vehicle. Little J looked sweet but skeptical in his lace bonnet. Fitting for a baptismal candidate?


Back to the present. After mucking about on my laptop for most of the morning, I rushed off to yoga. This was only my third class, but I'm (still) loving it. No matter how I feel going in to yoga, I feel (and even look) radiant afterwards. Possibly the result of a very brief nap during the restorative part of the class.


I felt so good that I decided to take our dog and my guided meditation MP3 file for a walk. We strolled to the end of our street and hit the trail. I listened to the guided meditation twice, which took us to a spot on the very edge of the city. Two deer grazed peacefully in a farmyard 100' away.


I turned off the MP3 player and headed home, slowing to say hello to a pair of ducks swimming in a swampy creek. A little further on a rustle in the bushes drew my attention away from my breath to a fawn and his mother, just a couple of yards from the trail.
I'm not (very?) religious, but at times like this it's hard not to think that God is pulling out all the stops to encourage me to get fit.


Charley didn't even bark or tug, much. He did lunge at one bicycle, two toy dogs, and a massive bulldog named Thumper, but he let several other bikes, animals, and joggers pass in peace. 

I've walked on this trail hundreds of times without paying any attention to the trail markers, but today I noticed that we walked 2 km, plus to and from the trail. I know, that's not very far!


The best part is, I enjoyed it so much that I'm looking forward to doing it again tomorrow morning.

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