holding our weight.

earlier this week, I joined a gym. in a new city – a city I didn’t plan to move to, but where it feels right. in the free training session I got with joining, the trainer asked me what i think strength means. I paused to pretend to think about it, and then lied, “I think… doing pull-ups with no problem?”

of course he was asking about strength in the gym, and of course I didn’t think he wanted to know what I really thought of that word. I miss my dear friend Lauren a lot this week, enough to talk to her a lot more than I usually do. I think of her surrender more now than I probably ever have. Not the self-pitying kind where we fall to our knees in defeat and tears spill all over the floor and we wonder why? why me?. I mean the knotted, clenching, deep, and gnarly surrender of falling to our knees with arms to the sky and tears spilling (still all over the floor). The “Ok, I see who I’m meant to be” kind of strength in surrender. The kind that leaves us bruised and without breath. That kind of strength: in knowing that this is, perhaps, the way it is.

Repeating really difficult tasks over and over make us strong, like pulling oneself up in pull-up. There is another strength, too, that we find we have despite never before encountering the heavy weight of a burden we must bear: leaving the hospital after visiting a loved one, or in getting out of bed - and maybe even into the shower - after a tears-soaked night of grief and little sleep. This strength may not come from practice, like push-ups over and over, holding our weight. This strength may be in the times we lie with seemingly nothing in our hands to show for ourselves, but where we knew enough to fall in surrender without a fight. The times we knew to cradle ourselves, hold our own weight on the way down.