This week Brené Brown’s The Midlife Unravelling has been hitting my feeds, and it’s well worth a read. I’ve been thinking lately that my crisis isn’t actually over and it was both validating and annoying to read something that made me realize…it never actually will be.

With this understood, I can get on with the job of living. From my front lines:

Physical Goals: I should be able to start running again this month, but I am taking it slowly. I’m using elliptical machines right now and I find I get to a point where the spot in my leg that actually broke hurts, somewhere between 25 and 30 minutes. So I stop.

This new method of respecting pain sits uncomfortably with me, because in the past I’ve had two modes: The “I’m too wounded/fat/stupid/uncoordinated/hurt” to do this mode, and the “to hell with it” mode where I would just push through any, you know, feelings until my body gave out and then rue it the next day. Finding the middle spot has been hard.

However, in doing a lot of upper-body work, I pulled a muscle, and that actually stopped me from doing some martial arts this week. My concern wasn’t so much the injury, but not doing both certain leg and certain arm things. I tell myself it’s because I’m staff and I have to present a higher standard of participation, but it was also just not wanting to look stupid.

I have found a new yoga class and it’s very different from gym yoga. Each class focuses on one sequence of moves, going deeper into them — not like yin yoga, but really working to perfect the understanding of that particular hatha cycle. I like it a lot.

Food-wise I’ve been eating medium-well; lots of veggies and generally whole foods, but also some snacking on Girl Guide cookies at night and a samosa/sweet onion roll addiction are not helping as I discovered Canbe Foods, which I have been driving past for about 10 years. Our farm share starts in two weeks. I keep not blogging so I hesitate to promise but I hope to post how that’s going.

I pretty much have had to give up alcohol, even beer and cider. For years I have pondered the mystery that I don’t get hangovers and tried to be careful not to drink too much because there were no natural consequences. Well, ha, ha, ha, now if I have even one drink my sleep is disrupted and I find that I am actually a Cranky Person the following day. This has led me to trying out Kombucha as something to have on the patio at the end of a hot day.

Family: I continue to enjoy the golden age of parenting when my kids are both old enough to amuse themselves a lot of the time and young enough to still want to be amused by their parents. (Although Noah is aging out of this rapidly.) I got to take a leadership course with Noah over the last 10 weeks and watching him participate and seeing different hints of the man he’s becoming was…amazing. I also hang out with Liam in the schoolyard each morning (no rush for the GO Train) and as one sample, he started talking to me about his take on Arthurian legend, in a fake Scottish accent no less, and it was…pretty glorious.

I can’t say that I’m engaged with work for fewer hours, but the geography changes things so much. I’m more present.

I gave up my gym membership (well I actually still have to do the paperwork, oops) and we got a family membership to the Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre. We’re there a lot all together and that’s…amazing.

Mentally,  one thing about leaping into supporting a martial arts organization as a career that I really hadn’t thought through what it’s like to work with a team that includes many late teens and early 20-somethings. I always joked that my career aged backwards like Merlin (note Arthurian reference): Seniors’ site, magazine for women at midlife, magazine for women, education-focused arts institution. But right now I find that my colleagues have aged backwards as well.

I have very few Gen X-Millennial conflicts to report; martial arts seems to bridge the gap. I do find myself reflecting more on the time in my 20s when it seemed like everyone I knew online was moving to Silicon Valley and sharing apartments and working weird new Internet jobs. I find my 20-something colleagues have the same sense of, well, chosen family that you might find historically documented in Microserfs, but they also seem more connected to their actual families than I remember feeling. But I was mostly getting married, so I was a bit off the usual track there.

I haven’t been writing as much as I would like to, but I have been writing more than I had in the previous oh, 5 years, so that’s a bonus.