It’s eleven at night, and I’m house sitting. This, often, literally amounts to sitting (or lying down) in a house and getting paid for it. This afternoon I rushed out the door to meet my dad and aunt at the gym and forgot my key. Well, I had my KEYS, but not THE KEY to the house where I’m staying. So I locked myself out. I hate when I do this. (I do this a lot.) Thankfully, I’d left a window open, so when I got back later, I just crawled through it. I say just, but I had to climb up on a chair, crawl halfway through the window, balance myself on my stomach like a see-saw, teeter myself down into the bathtub on the other side of the window, support myself with my arms, then finally bring my legs in for a B+ (somewhat wet) landing.

Seriously, I felt like I belonged in Cirque de Soleil.

Once I had a middle-aged student tell me they tried to keep themselves in shape in order to have more options. That is, if they got the chance to go roller skating, hiking, or dancing, they wanted to be able to say yes. They didn’t want to HAVE to say no because their body couldn’t perform because they hadn’t cared for it. This story has stuck with me, and I feel the same way. I want to be able to dance, run, um, crawl through windows well into my senior years. I want to be able to travel, hike, play with my nephews. Sure, I know shit happens beyond our control. Recently I busted my knee up (sort of my own fault, but I wasn’t PLANNING ON busting it up) and had to have surgery. But on a daily basis I have a choice about how I re-hab the damn thing, whether I stick with my program or not.

Some people say I’m motivated in terms of my leg. Recently I shared with someone how writing every day has truly transformed my life, and they said, “I wish I could find that motivation.” UHH–I don’t know what to tell you. Personally, I don’t think of myself as all-the-time motivated because I think motivation is fleeting. You get excited about something–feeling better, starting a project–and there’s this window. You think, Okay, I’m going to start. Or not. But after that, either way, the window closes, meaning, the excitement fades. After over two years of blogging or four months of rehab do I consider myself motivated? Not really. More than anything, I’m committed–because I know this stuff works. Said another way, I’ve gone from being motivated to believing.

That’s the ticket–belief. Motivations make you TRY. Beliefs make you CONTINUE TO ACT.

That’s nice to hear–that I believe in what I’m doing. (Sometimes I don’t know things until I write them down.) But I guess I do. At some point over the past few months I’ve begun believing that as I continue to do my leg rehab I’ll get back to doing the things I love–running, jumping, dancing. At some point over the last two years, I’ve begun believing in this process of sitting down daily (uh, nightly) to meet myself and figure things out, to heal. This is to say that I’ve come to believe in myself, that I know no matter what life throws at me, I can handle it, that even if no one else can, I can be there for me. This, I think, is called self-empowerment and is perhaps the closest thing you can get to solid ground in an unpredictable universe like the one we live in, where shit happens, where you can lock yourself out of a house or bust your knee up just as easily.