Moving Into Discomfort

​As I ran my six miles this morning, through the fog, I tried to pay extra attention to the world around me.  It was a hilly run, so it was easy to notice the landscape under my feet, and the fog made the woods and the front yards and the occasional farm especially picturesque.  In the final mile is when I hit the steepest, longest hill, and my thoughts turned to the issue of discomfort.
 
As I stated in my blog entry from a few days ago, about traumatic grieving, as humans we naturally do our utmost to avoid discomfort.  We are on the lookout for pleasurable endeavors, so we can run toward them, and for unpleasant situations, so we can run away from them.  There’s a biological reason we humans are programmed for this, as a matter of survival.  Avoid danger.
 
Today, December 14th, is really awful, at least here in CT, for obvious reasons.  It’s, as one of my Facebook friends, whose daughter died in the Aurora CO shooting, called it - the tragiversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.  Many of us are well aware of the pain and suffering and horror and anger and all sorts of unpleasant emotions that were unleashed three years ago today, and show up in full force for some, at times, but for most usually simmer somewhere under the surface. 
 
It is uncomfortable, to say the least, to anticipate and then experience a tragiversary.  Most of us have probably experienced loss in some way, and may have strong feelings toward an upcoming milestone – it would have been my dad’s 67th birthday; my mom is missing her only granddaughter’s wedding; and so on. 
 
Today is the third tragiversary of an extremely traumatic event that, if you are a parent, most likely devastated you, caused you to draw your children in closer and question whether or not you could go on living if this had happened to your family. 

​“It feels like I am intruding on the grieving families when I say that this is a difficult day for me.  I mean, it was their child who was killed.  And yet – I put myself in their position and I can’t stop crying.”

​ 
What do we do?  

​“I feel like, going to work on such a heavy day is such a trivial thing.”
 
“I don’t want to disturb the grieving family by reaching out, but I don’t want them to think I’m just going through my day as usual.”

Many runners purposefully seek out easier routes – they are flatter, or faster to get to, or they have bathroom and hydration options.  Runners who are trying to qualify for Boston Marathon will typically choose a qualifying marathon that has a less challenging course (i.e. flatter), and is at a time of year where training for it won’t involve obstacles such as nasty winter weather or a heavy work load.
 
When it comes to life, we often do the same thing.  We look for the easier options, so that we don’t have to endure messy emotions or conversations. So we don’t have to risk rejection or failure, or even, success.  Brené Brown does a great job explaining how we are addicted to numbing.  Rather than face boredom, anger, frustration, sadness, insecurity, fear, even joy – we have made it a habit to turn to social media, food, booze, TV, shopping, etc. 
 
I thought of this as I charged up that hill, tuned into the effort in my quads, glutes, lungs.  A song from the 90s popped into my head with the lyrics “I bleed just to know I’m alive” and I thought about the fact that so often, we get on this autopilot and our day, emotionally, is basically a flatline with the occasional blip when we experience annoyance at the idiot sitting in the left lane on the highway or the dog that can’t decide if it wants to stay outside or come back in.  True, deep emotion is something we are typically not comfortable with so as soon as it starts to ripple our surface, we shift, redirect.  As I thought of that song, I thought of people who engage in self-injury (“cutting”) and how usually, as opposed to what many believe, they are not cutting as a precursor to or flirt with suicide, but rather as a release.  As an expression of and quick access to deep emotion, which is otherwise suppressed.
 
Today, many of us are off the flatlining autopilot.  Many of us today have an opportunity to pay attention to our emotions and hopefully we have found a safe, supportive venue in which to express them.  Sadly, our culture doesn’t typically deal well with grief, or death, or the conversation about these painful parts of life.  The anniversary of something that evokes deep loss or even profound joy can, however, be a time in which we acknowledge these very real, raw human emotions and we give ourselves permission to pause in our busyness and connect.  Connect with our feelings.  Connect with others who get it, who get us.  Connect with the world within, and around us.  Rather than numb, let’s feel. 

 We feel helpless as we are at a loss of what to do and say.  We may be confused by our feelings (which we try to avoid or ignore), because we may not think we have a right to them.  Or that we may be ridiculed or resented for feeling that way.  When my family was devastated by a suicide, I sat down and wrote about it.  A wise friend said to me, upon reading my words:

"Pain which is not transformed is transferred.  May your writing along with the presence of Infinite Love bring that slow transformation which we all long for."
​- Brandon Nappi

Pain, whether experienced directly through the loss of a spouse, child, parent or sibling, has a ripple effect.  We are all connected, and our feelings, thoughts, words and actions have an impact on those around and beyond us.  What we fail to express will reveal itself eventually, in our health, our relationships, our children and even their children.

When my friend asked, what do we do?  I didn't answer, as I also wondered about this.  And then the words, just be, came into my head.  Just sit, feel the heaviness, the tears, all that ugly, messy stuff.  Let it flow.  Let it be transformed, so it is not transferred.

At this point, the hill I was running leveled out and as I peered into a front yard, I saw a young male dear.  He ran a few steps away from me and then paused and turned.  I kept running, ignoring the urge to take my phone out and snap a picture.  I smiled at him as he kept a furtive eye on me.  I ran faster, with the hills behind me until my next run.