Heaviness Can Be A sign of Life

​Someone asked me yesterday, what do you do to find balance, to bring equilibrium to the heaviness of your work?

I said, it's usually writing or a long walk or hike.

Yesterday, after one of those heavy speaking engagements, I chose hike. On the way up the mountain, I felt as out of breath as I've felt in a long time.

I guess I've been choosing writing over hiking a bit too much lately.

While stopped and gasping for a bit of air, it occurred to me that in my search for respite from heaviness, I had entered into more heaviness. This also occurred to me; what a beautiful sign of life breathlessness can be.

Nothing makes you more aware of life than gasping for the breaths that sustain it.

At the top of the mountain, heaviness gone, the weight lifted, I looked out over Virginia's most beautiful colors from one of Virginia's most fantastic points of view. And I pondered, how does one ever experience the freedom of a weight lifted if they've never acknowledge the weight?

I have spent the last several years acknowledging the weights in my life. The heaviness. And although they have not all been lifted, I am no longer afraid of acknowledging them.

I am no longer hiding from them.

In fact, far more than fearing the heaviness in life, I fear returning to patterns of trying to avoid it. I have felt far more alive in the heaviness of my life than I ever felt in the numbness that came from denying it.

Life does indeed come from climbing the mountains in our lives, not in pretending they don't exist. Not in trying to find the seemingly easiest way around them.

Someone said to me in our session yesterday, "I have never heard anyone explain what you just explained the way you explained it. And I understand it more than I've ever understood it."

It is not lost on my why that is.

It's because she accepted the invitation to explore the heaviness of her life. She accepted the invitation to explore that heaviness as a friend and not a predator. She accepted the invitation to see weight as the pathway to weight lifted.

And so more than learning a lesson, she began a journey to unloading burdens that had been weighing her down.

She began a journey of feeling a bit out of breath, but with newfound confidence that new breath is coming.

And maybe like me, she discovered, or will discover, that being out of breath in life is far more exhilarating than not breathing at all.