Stepping forward

I went to the track workout tonight (I say with casual offhandedness, as if it hasn't been nearly two years since I've posted anything on this blog — just go with it for a moment).

GO!

I've been going to the track off and on for eight years now, sometimes going every week for months and sometimes not going every week for months. As it's happening, I'm never aware of the precise reason why I'm switching from "on" to "off" or vice versa, but with the clarity of hindsight, generally speaking "going to the track" has meant, for me, a lust to push my life forward, while "skipping the track" has meant a metaphorical level of exhaustion has set in and it's time to rest. Both transitions are ultimately rooted in frustration with the status quo, and both, when they happen, do so with seemingly little input from my conscious self.

Alas, for the time being, I'm in track mode (just along for the ride).

When I got home tonight, I was thinking about how the workout went (rough) and how I wished I'd written down my times from the past two weeks because as bad as tonight felt, I knew that even the three short weeks that I've been going have resulted in some improvement. And then I thought about the things that I'd written on this blog about the track workout, and so I read back through some of them, and in the process, I was both heartened and annoyed by the wisdom of my younger self.

For these past two years, I haven't been writing publicly, but I have been journaling extensively. The upside of journaling is that all the grit and reality gets thrown in, no concern for putting on a good presentation when you know no one's going to be reading the end result. The downside of journaling is that (unlike blogging) that lack of filter rarely leads to the sorts of carefully conceived insights that prove themselves most useful later in life. (Like coming to the realization that the track workout fades in and out for me on a rough schedule, and isn't something that's entirely random.)

I don't know what the future holds in terms of my public writing. I have a real job, a career even, and with that comes responsibilities of maintaining a level of public privacy (if that makes sense). The world has also changed (a lot in the twelve years since I started writing online, but even more in the past two years alone) and so much of this just isn't fun anymore. And then there's that I think a part of growing up is realizing that there's a time to express yourself and there's a time when just thinking your thoughts and then letting them go is enough.

But then there are also times when you look around and you think that things are going fine but there's an urge somewhere deep that's pushing you.

So you start going back to the track workout.

And you wait to see what happens next.