On fixing things

I like running because it makes me feel safer, more at home in my body. I am still--annoyingly--prone to panic attacks and heart palpitations and all sorts of stress symptoms, but it's a comforting feeling when my heart skips around or thuds so hard it knocks my breath away to think, ah, yes, we've been here before. I like thinking how if I have physical limits, they're somewhere in the distance. And I like waking up in the morning with a twinge to my muscles, that kind of reminder that yesterday we went somewhere just a little further, a little harder, and here I am.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about health--emotional, physical, spiritual, relational. J and I are doing pre-marital counseling, which has been good--but there's something so intense about seeing your relationship and your "strengths and growth areas," as they say, plotted out on a graph, all the fights and reconcilations and sweet private moments reduced to numbers. Once I had a counseling session and then a doctor's appointment right after, and it was odd--I felt like there was so much that needed to be fixed.

Which is true; there always is. Pardon the irreverence, but the other day I was reading the Bible while sitting on the toilet and I came across the passage about how our lowly earthly bodies will be renewed, when we get to heaven--and it had never seemed truer than in that moment, thinking about what my body was doing, and how it was, well, really icky. And how incredible, to be able to have all those issues and problems, both physical and immaterial, fixed, forever. I can't imagine.

I should try more often, though, I think. It's easy to forget.