So, 2022 was all about my fitness goals in the year I turned 50. Between that and everything else that went on last year, it turned out to be almost too intense!
In 2023 I’ve decided to turn my attention more to emotional well-being, mental health and even spiritual “fitness” which, as a not particularly religious person, I feel will be a good challenge. And so the question I’m asking first and foremost is: how do we be more present in our lives, with ourselves and with the people we love, how do we increase connection?
Some relationships pose greater challenges for connection, others are easy. Some distances between us are psychic or socioeconomic or based on how other parts of our daily lived experience differ from others; other distances are purely physical.
Case in point: everyone knows how much I love my three siblings, but we all live so far away from each other it makes connection a little harder. But my older brother just bought tickets for a trip to visit in February for Presidents’ Day weekend and I’m so excited! This will be his third time visiting me in Florida since I moved here almost 14 years ago. Dave for the visiting-sister win! (Although, in all fairness, I do think that Steph has visited 2 or 3 times as well.)
I’m also going to visit my sister in April for her birthday and to be together for the 1st anniversary of our mom’s death. Definitely will be a future blog post about that! (A past visit was chronicled in a poem I still enjoy reading, even though I feel like I was sort of a different person back then.) Now I just have to get my younger brother to come for a visit, and since he is not a huge traveler, I may just have to settle for him coming out with the other sibs next December Xmas visit for which I’m lobbying hard.
But before letting go of 2022, when I reflect back I actually see a lot of effort toward connection already. And this ended up meaning A LOT of airplane travel!
Totally not bragging but because I like to count things and I’m still amazed by it, I have to add up (in no particular order) all the ways in which I accidentally reached silver medallion status on my Delta SkyMiles account: trip to Seattle in March for younger bro‘s 40th birthday, trip to see mom in April and then back again in April for the funeral; New Orleans for half marathon in March; a college friend’s wedding in California in June and another college friend’s 50th bday weekend in October held in Austin, TX; 4th of July long weekend trip to visit a friend in Denver, Colorado; trip to Hawaii in July followed by a few days in Seattle; trip to Milwaukee in June. And, of course, the recent Mexico trip.
The shortest trip of all of these was to New Orleans, which was only one night. We basically flew in, spent one night, raced the next morning and then flew back that evening. But we managed to fit in some good food because - NOLA!
I adore my running buddy, who has recently taken a hiatus from running half marathons with me but in the ebb and flow that is connection, I just have to have faith that she will return and there will be more fun race-related travels in the future. Maybe even another trip to New Orleans! Just gotta have faith.
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