What fear have I been moving past — and what would it look like to stop and be with it for five breaths?
On the body
Three weeks ago, I started a run club.
Four meetups in, one of those Saturdays nobody came. I had my daughter with me in her running stroller, and the version of that morning I told everyone — the surface version, the easy version — was that I was actually relieved. It meant I could cater entirely to her. We cut the run shorter. We went to the coffee shop. We got a drink and something sweet and it was a lovely morning.
That version is true. We did all of those things and it was a lovely morning.
But underneath that version, in the quieter place I don't always let people see, I was disappointed. And then I was sad. And then my brain did what brains do and started trying to answer the question nobody asked out loud: why did no one show up?
It went through a lot of possibilities. It landed, loudly and repeatedly, on me. I wasn't good enough. I wasn't worth someone's Saturday morning. I just wasn't the kind of person people showed up for.
I know, logically, that none of those things are true. I could argue myself out of each one. But this wasn't a situation I could logic my way out of — it was an emotional one, and my ego was hurt, and so I put on a surface-level smile and sent the messages that said no worries, maybe we'll see you next time and carried the actual feeling around quietly for a few days instead.
Monday, someone showed up to run club. The Monday after that, another woman came. Two more pieces of evidence filed carefully into a folder in my brain for the next time I'm in that situation.
On the fear
The fear I keep moving past — the one I've been most practiced at not stopping with — is loneliness.
Not loneliness in a dramatic, acute sense. More like the specific loneliness of someone who built a village somewhere that isn't where she started, who knows how hard that was, and who can feel the village beginning to shift. A good friend is moving away. Her daughter, who is close with mine, is moving with her, obviously. A few others are in difficult seasons of their own and need more breathing room than usual. The physical circle here in Belgium is getting smaller, and I can feel it happening before it's fully happened, which in some ways is harder than the thing itself.
I have a lot of evidence of what happens to friendships when distance gets added. I watched it happen to the ones we left behind in America when we moved. I watched it happen to friends who moved away from Belgium. The evidence is not encouraging. Life gets full, inboxes get fuller, weeks pass and then months, and out of sight out of mind turns out to be less of a cliché and more of an honest description of how most people — including me, I'm not exempt — navigate the limits of attention and time.
The fear isn't really that people will forget me. It's that I'll have to work so hard to be remembered — and that even then, the effort might not be enough.
I know I'm going to have to build new systems. More intentional reach-outs, more scheduled calls, more of the consistent unglamorous work that close friendships across distance require. I know this. I'm not sure I'm ready for it or that I’ll be successful in it. I hope I am.
On getting still
Low Lunge asks you to get low and stay. One knee on the ground, one foot forward, hips sinking into the stretch. It's not a dramatic pose. It doesn't ask you to leap or balance or commit to anything irreversible. It just asks you to stop moving and be in the discomfort for a few breaths.
That's what this week is — the stopping part. Not the solving part. Not the systems part. Not the signed-up-for-a-marathon-so-I-must-be-fine part. Just the acknowledgment that there's something I keep moving past, and it's worth stopping with for five breaths before I figure out what to do about it.
This week I have a therapy appointment, and I'm looking forward to it in the way you look forward to something when you know you've been carrying around something that's gotten too heavy to carry alone and someone yells out “you need a hand?”. I don't need her to fix the fear. I just need help figuring out how to move through it without dragging all of it with me indefinitely — how to feel it fully without letting it become the whole story.
The run club fear, the village fear, the fear of not being enough to hold the things I love together — these don't get resolved this week. But this week I'm at least letting them sit at the table instead of sending them to the background with a surface-level smile.
Two more Mondays, two more women showed up. I'm filing that away too.
The question is still open. I'll be sitting with it all week.
What fear have you been moving past — and what would it look like to stop and be with it for five breaths?
Plant your feet. Open toward the light. This is how we grow.
Three weeks ago I started a run club. One Saturday nobody came. The surface version of that morning was fine — we went to the coffee shop, it was lovely. The underneath version is what I've been sitting with since. On loneliness, the village shrinking, and what it looks like to finally stop moving past the fear long enough to be with it for five breaths.