It was my junior year in college. I was lying on my bed staring at the ceiling, thinking about how I had nothing better to do than to lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. The NBA played on my tiny 10" TV while pop punk rattled off lines of sorrow over the sounds of buzzers and cheers. Stacks of books covered my desk for the 15, 20, and 30 page papers I had due at semester's end. I had ambitions for my future and hobbies that could have kept me busy but none of them were working. My writing was out of emptiness; my photography was out of searching for something more that I, at this point, had yet to find; my interests in music were out of loneliness; and my rolling around on a homemade Indo board was out of desperation and longing to return to California, where I had been living the past several months. I had an idea of what I wanted my future to look like.
But I had absolutely no idea what to do with today.
I started running again.
In the middle of winter, I began to run again. Jogging slowly with a sureness that I needed motion. And then quicker and farther. Running up and over snow mounds and sprinting stairs. An energy awoke inside me and I discovered that emotions could move. And suddenly, I wasn't doing things out of nothingness, blankness, loneliness. I was chasing down being alive.
After a few months, I ran my first half marathon. And weeks later moved into a house of three girls who were full of that life that I was reviving in myself. Soon after that, I met the man that would teach me to wakeboard, skateboard, wake surf, snowboard, cross country ski, and to mountain bike. The man that had no fear and all love. The man that lived life in a way that I had never known. The man that I married.
So here's the deal. I'm not writing this to tell you to get up off that bed and take control of your life. I get it, it isn't that simple. But I will tell you to have faith. And when I say have faith, I'm not commanding you to change your frame of mind and instantly be a hero at it. I know that learning to have faith isn't like flipping a switch - it's a journey that you'll practice for the rest of your life. But you can start today. Start by simply having faith that someday, down the road, you will receive the people and the experiences that will fill the empty spaces in your heart. You will know fullness, you will know busy, you will know that good kind of exhaustion, you will know love. Today, your future self is learning gratitude. And maybe it hurts or maybe it feels like a terrible sort of nothing at all but have faith and ride it out like a wave that is destined to reach the shore.
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