I'm all kinds of stiff and I didn't get out of work early enough, so I bailed on practice and just joined the dojo crowd for Mexican food.
I begin to understand why Mona doesn't care for Mexican food: it's really not very interesting. I'm about done with it, except for the occasional burrito from Los Amigos Taqueria in Foster City.
I'm feeling a little distant from the dojo, not having trained there much in the past few weeks. But it's okay. Happy is happy, unhappy is unhappy, hard training is hard training, busy life is busy life. Just like this. Although I do need some mighty sleep.
I've been forgetting to breathe. I've always had this thing where I'll get lost focusing on a book or something, and I'll exhale and just stay exhaled, with minimal shallow breathing, for a couple of minutes, until I suddenly gasp in all the way and realize I haven't been getting a full dose of oxygen. This week my shoulders have been really tense and hunched forward, and tonight I discovered that that's part of why I haven't been remembering to inhale: to breathe in I have to fight the tension in my shoulders. If I bring my head up to align my spine, my shoulders fall back naturally, making it easier to breathe, which makes it easier to relax.
Sometimes our lives come to a crossroads, where we choose to make a commitment or not: the opportunity to have a child, or get married, or give away everything you own and try to find a different way to live. At these junctions we make our choices as best we can with the information we have at the time, but even knowing we made the right choice, we have a kind of shadow life in our minds that parallels reality. Not necessarily a source of pain, but a little bit of wondering to distract us in our tired moments: a tiny little "yes" rather than "no", a single moment swung in the other direction, and who would I be now?