Life's Chapters

"Death solves all problems. No man, no problem."
~Joseph Stalin


"The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown."
~Carl Jung




I am a firm believer that everything is either cyclical or occurs in periods. Life is periodical, as weird as it sounds. As always, I can only speak for myself, and my life has neatly broken down into a few major periods, or even chapters, if you will. I suspect I am not the first or even the 10 millionth person to say this or think of it. It fits, so I will roll with it, however cliche.

For me, life's phases are often defined and punctuated by the kind or quality of struggle to get through the phase, or the degree of difficulty each phase presents. I have had phases of extreme difficulty and phases where life was literally one bike ride, one run, one swim at a time. Maybe this makes me a "glass is half empty" type of person; after all, could I not be also describing these phases by how EASY they were to get through, rather than how HARD? I like to think of it as realism. The glass is too damn big.

Currently I am struggling, struggling big time. I am struggling in my current chapter of life to endure even those things which used to be what I would consider defining characteristics of life's "easy" chapters. Now, even those are difficult, even those things result in untoward stress and trepidation. Work, my beloved work, is ridiculously overwhelming and a major struggle every day. Training is even a struggle. My marriage is probably the biggest struggle of all of them.

It is not lost on me that in life nothing is experienced in isolation; at least I am (somewhat surprisingly to myself) unable to compartmentalise these considerations into uniqe and isolated pockets of resistance. Nope. Its all fucked. Big time. And therefore the blood that spills forth from one battle can not be contained in its "life bucket" and spills into its neighbor. All of my buckets are beginning to resemble each other, as a murky mixture of all of the other problems. Marriage problems spill into dealing with everything else. Work requires so much more effort that I can not keep it from fucking up my training. And if my training, the one thing I hold sacred as my own, personal respite, is not going well... Forget it.

The glass is too damn big--but only if it's holding water. That analogy breaks down when you have to describe the epic tons of horseshit that the glass is trying to hold during this particular chapter of my life. In this case, the glass keeps increasing in size to accomodate more and more crap.

Ironman is 153 days and 15 hours away. And right now, sheer determination is getting me through. How long can it last?