When I was at my most un-fit, I confided in a friend that I had a crazy dream. The dream was that someday, when I died, I would go to heaven and ride my bike. In particular, I wanted to ride my purple Schwinn that I had as a girl, with the flowered banana seat. I dreamt that in heaven I could ride it down a very specific hill in my hometown. I so looked forward to being able to do this.
My friend looked at me with grave concern. First she said, “I thought you were an Atheist? Since when did you start believing in heaven? And Also, why not ride your bike now? Why wait until you’re dead?
Because I couldn’t.
Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I’m sure I could have ridden my bike a few hundred yards, down a flat straightaway but there was no way I could ride my bike up the hill, that one had to summit, to get to that great downhill. And, I didn’t just want to ride down the hill, I wanted to take my hands off the handlebars for a brief moment, hold them straight out to my sides like wings and feel the wind and that momentary sense of weightlessness that you get when gravity is doing all the work.
I wish I could write that my friend’s words were what made me get off my butt and start exercising, but that would not be the truth.
Over the course of the next year or two I started noticing some things. Have you ever been sitting on your couch, eating potato chips and suddenly you see a person with artificial legs finishing the Boston Marathon? Or swimming the English Channel? or climbing a mountain? Have you ever looked down at your soft, able body sitting on the couch and thought, “What the hell am I doing?”
Yeah. Me too.
In addition to that, I watched a few friends dealing with some pretty difficult health diagnoses. Suddenly, they were faced with fighting a battle that they had no choice but to fight. There they were, in the ring, gloves up saying, “this life is worth fighting for!” and I was in such awe of these friends. And again, I looked down at my soft, able body sitting on the couch and said, “What the hell am I doing?”
This life, this body, is worth fighting for.
But probably the biggest thing that happened was that when my daughter came home after a semester of college and was a total mess, I was unable to help her because I was such a mess myself. I was physically and mentally out of shape, sitting on the couch, and pretty much useless to anyone. When I reached out to my dearest friends to ask what I should do to help her, they all individually kind of said the same thing to me, “What the hell are you doing?” followed by a polite, “Forget about her, What are you going to do to take care of yourself?”
So, I got off the couch. I took my soft, able body to a gym. I started eating differently. I went to therapy (let’s take the stigma out of taking care of our mental health).
I wish I could say that a miracle happened and “suddenly” I was better, but that’s not how it works. It is a lot of work. It is choosing every day to make healthy choices, eat the right things and move my body. It is giving myself healthy boundaries and learning that taking care of myself is just as important, if not more so, than taking care of others. It is learning that the better I feel, the more I am able to help others.
It is a daily battle and some days are more successful than others but my able soft body, is slowly becoming leaner and my mind sharper.
I even started riding my bike again, and was gifted a new purple bike (unfortunately lacking the requisite flowered banana seat). I can’t begin to tell you the joy it gave me to ride my bike again.
A few weeks ago, my husband and I decided to go for a longer ride than usual, and although we usually stick to the bike path, this time we chose to go on real roads.
The bike path is pretty flat so being faced with the rolling hills of this part of Massachusetts was both more challenging and easier than I expected. The strength of my body surprised me. I didn’t have to walk my bike up a single hill. But, when we reached our mid-point destination and realized that we had to turn around and do it all again, it felt daunting and impossible. But, we persisted. Towards the end of the ride we were approaching a hill that we have driven over in our car many times. It is a hill that if you go over with enough speed, the car kind of takes air for a moment and then drops. Our kids always called it the “roller coaster hill” and cheered for us to take it as fast as we legally (or not so legally) could. By the time we reached this hill we had almost ridden twenty miles and my legs felt a bit like spaghetti. But, inside my 52 year old head, my ten year old self, who rode that purple Schwinn with the flowered banana seat was yelling, “C’mon, go faster! Lets see if we can get some air! So, I dug down deep, to resources I didn’t even know I had and I pedaled as fast as I could while my husband who was keeping pace behind me was screaming, “What the hell?!?!?”
I pedaled and pedaled, gaining more and more momentum and then I crested the top. I would love to say that I took air, put my arms out and flew. But, alas, I am no longer ten and no longer weigh 60 lbs. A woman of my girth and weight does not “take air” so easily, if at all. I also think letting go of the handle bars, and trying to put my arms out to “fly” would have been a bad, bad idea. However, I did have a moment of weightlessness. I had a brief moment of feeling the wind blowing against my body, keeping me “afloat”. And in that moment I had a surge of happiness that flooded my body that absolutely brought me back to being that ten year old girl. And so I asked her, “Is this okay? Is this good?” And she said,
“Oh yeah. I’m in heaven.”
