Dangerous Ground

I don’t worry about the bruises, the cuts, the scrapes, the callouses, and the scars that are easy to see… for me, it’s the things I can’t see… the vulnerabilities that threaten from the inside out that are the most dangerous and the most telling. 

It’s the thoughts that creep in with doubt when I am fatigued in a race, it’s the burnout after an intense training schedule,  it’s the early mornings and late nights when the training seems nearly impossible to fathom let alone finish. It’s juggling it all.  It’s the voice in the back of my mind that makes me question everything.  It’s the snowball that follows.  The plunge into icy waters of doubt and feeling the pull downwards.  It’s admitting it’s there.  It’s speaking the words aloud. 

The kids, the house, the traveling, the demands physical and mental.  It’s the emotional roller coaster we experience with friends, family, love, loss, and stress.  It’s being and doing.  It’s not even anything extraordinary, complicated, or unique, it’s just…life.

I don’t blow up, I build and bubble up from the deepest recesses of my mind and body.  It begins in whispers in small tugs, the warnings I’m on dangerous ground.  It festers in my own thoughts and the insecurities that speak to my very core and the things that define me but it’s not a decisive blow or a kill shot.  It stays dynamic and alive just below the surface.   Not threatening to explode, but a constant threat of something treacherous underfoot, the ground fragile and uncertain. 

The thousands of tiny raindrops suddenly causing a flood, a massive destructive force that continues to rise up around me.  But then there comes my moment to act, to choose.  Moving forward when I don’t want to, rising up when I don’t think I can... And it’s not even anything extraordinary, complicated, or unique, it’s just… living.