April 18, 2006

Tuesday night – wow! I usually finish this by Sunday or Monday at the latest. Times are going by faster and days seem busier…while I’ve been maintaining this journal for over a year now, I am always questioned as to why I do it – week after week, month after month…

I remember a moment a couple years ago when I was running around a 4 mile lake and I was huffing and puffing, engaged entirely in my movement, my motion and my goal – as I ran I kept on thinking, and as I thought I started to wonder – what would happen if I stopped and walked a little bit and maybe jogged and walked my way to the end of the workout? As an over achiever, I never fathomed ‘giving up’ – but as I ran, I realized that even if I stopped, the fact that I continued running even though it wasn’t a consistent run, was still an achievement.

For a moment, I wondered how it felt like to ‘stop’. And the moment my brain said, ‘stop’ many other things began to ripple off of this small action to deface a piece of who I thought I was.

I started gaining weight, I started eating late at night, I stopped going out, I stopped going shopping or hanging out with friends…For over a year, I felt like I was standing in the middle of a still pond, watching my life pass by, watching other people’s live’s pass by, while I stood and watched motionless, trying to figure out why everyone is moving…what made people move? What made people get out of bed? What made me do what I had done all the 23 years I was living at the time?

I realized that by externally putting a ‘pause’ on my life – in reality, my life was spiritually moving. For in contrary to prior beliefs, in the past, while I was really ‘moving’ – in reality, I really wasn’t going anywhere internally. Life and age is really determined through wisdom and personal growth and not what you’ve accumulated or done in your lifetime.

Sometimes it’s good to stop. Just stop. Everything.

Stopping forces you to look. It forces you to hear, smell, see, sense all that is happening around you…and not just see the world through you.

I didn’t meet deadline for my journal entry for one day to see what it would do to me: would it force me to stop writing altogether? Skip a week? Or would I continue writing my journal by somehow finding inspiration?

Like running, like writing, like working…you will stop sometimes, but by stopping, not only do you re-define your reasons, but you also re-energize your purpose for moving.