I’m writing this as I sit at Serendipity, so it seemed like a good title for a blog post.  Sometimes I don’t put a title on a blog post until after I’ve written it; tonight, however, I just intend to ramble a little bit, so “Serendipity” seemed like a good jumping off point.

First off, little about my last week has been serendipitous, except (possibly) in deep retrospect.  I’ve been chugging along at work, on projects, and getting out a few evenings a week for meetups and other events, but mostly have been trying to put the brakes on a sort of submerged moodiness, a navel-gazing introspection that doesn’t do me any good.   Funny how life works sometimes.  There’s a big difference between being surprised about something we see in ourselves vs. recognizing something that was already there all along.

Having said that, it hasn’t been a bad week – far from it.  For example, I put in place an organizational/reminder system that is helping me stay focused on some specific short-term goals I have, and it’s worked wonders.  The system is tactile and visual and I see it every day at work and it keeps me on track when I’m tempted to run off the rails.

I’ve been very good with my exercise and diet program, after experiencing a road bump that started a few weeks ago and lasted a week or ten days.  I’m working out five or six days a week and being VERY good about what I eat, and it’s showing.  I hope to hit a huge milestone in the next week – a weight that I haven’t held since 1992.  I’m pretty sure I can do it without much in the way of superhuman effort.  However, if it takes a superhuman effort, I’m going to give it

As far as fitness goes, yesterday I ran the 6 mile loop around Lake Union, and am running a 5K on February 13th, so that means I need to get back on the hard intervals in the next couple weeks.  Tomorrow (I think – maybe Sunday) I’m going to do a 50-miler on the bike.  Not sure where I’m going, but part of the fun is the – well, serendipity – of not having a set destination when you start out and discovering fun things along the way.  The last 50+ I did, the weather was terrible, but I had tons of fun despite (or because of) that.  The weather tomorrow looks decent.

Funny story – I was almost done with my run yesterday when a group of four young runners passes me and the last guy yells “You have the biggest calves I’ve ever seen!” I laughed.  I do have big,muscular calves. What’s weird?  I went for a walk today with a friend from work and saw the EXACT SAME GUY running with the EXACT SAME GROUP.  Eerie.

This week I registered for the Big Climb for Leukemia and Lymphoma, which is like a 1,000,000 stair climb up the Columbia Center, and if you are feeling generous and care to donate to a worthy cause, you can do so at my donations page.  I’d better bust my ass in February up the Blaine Street staircase on Capitol Hill if I’m going to beat my age-group placing from last November’s climb at the WAMU tower.

I’ve been distracted from writing lately – at least anything more than simple coming-attraction posts – and that’s something I DO worry about.  In the past, I’ve sort of let it all hang out on the blog, but not only do I feel a little subconsciously constrained here, but I have what I might describe as writer’s block on a couple important pieces I have committed to write.  I’m convinced that the one feeds the other.  When you pull the reins on one horse, the other horses slow down.  I don’t like it.  I like to live life fully, freely, unconstrained, not too worried about convention or appearances or fashionableness or propriety.  It’s all just ME, and I’m a good, caring, authentic person and want to express myself as such.  So I’m a bit stumped, tending to glumness about this whole writing thing.  I have to break through and get back to where I was before, because writing and expressing myself is one of the things in this world that gives me pure joy and doesn’t depend on anybody else.

Now I look back and see the novel I’ve written tonight and think that perhaps this longish post is already a start in the right direction.

Tomorrow, November 4th, I turn 38.  Another milestone, although birthdays become FAR less important as you get older, and especially when you have kids and all the household birthday-energy gets transferred to making their birthdays the special occasions.

But as a milestone, it naturally lends itself to questions like “what has happened in the past year?” “what’s been good?” “what’s been not-so-good?” and so on.

I can say with the straightest of faces that this has been perhaps the most turbulent year of my life, for a variety of reasons. Some of the items have been so personal that even an open-the-kimono blogger like me avoids discussing them, while others are what you might call fit for public consumption.  It doesn’t really matter the reasons.  Whether or not I could describe my year as “The Greatest Story Ever Told” or “Les Miserables”, a finished book is still in some sense a finished book, no matter what words were printed on its pages.  And I would really like to shelve this  book and move on to #38, hopefully with fewer repeat performances and more … newness.  More excitement.  More inspiration.  More mutuality.  More …. lots more of a lot of things.  The list is endless, and personal.

I will say one thing that went exceedingly well for me this past year – my fitness program.  That is one new thing I’ll carry over to the next year without question.  I’ve also made some wonderful new friends which I’m very grateful for.  I’ve been blogging very consistently and frequently.  I’ve learned a lot of new things in my profession and made a lot of great contacts.  I’ve excelled at my job.  I’ve been karmically rewarded with two very happy, healthy kids in whom I take the utmost delight.

Yet thinking about it further, maybe the best thing that happened to me was a novel, never-before-experienced sense of self-discovery.  I’ve always been introspective, but this year I probed depths that I didn’t even suspect existed. I learned a TON about myself, both during how I dealt with good times as well as bad times.  I learned (relearned?) what’s important to me.  I have a renewed sense of who I am, what I need, and what I want.  I think I still have a ways to go in terms of improving my ability to act on my convictions, but I’ve come a long way.

What’s not gone so well?  Better not to dwell on the negatives.  Acknowledge, yes; obsess, no.  There are too many opportunities in life to make oneself unhappy that one shouldn’t go around borrowing trouble.  I do hope, and suspect, that many of the lessons learned in year 37 will stick with me for a long time.

I’m too old and cynical to hope that tomorrow, when I wake up, everything will have changed for the better, all the leaves turned over, all the dust swept out from the recesses of my mind.  All I can hope is that tomorrow is better than today, and that the day after that will be better still; like a retirement fund, happiness is sometimes a long-term proposition and one has to be patient and wait out rough spots and have enough confidence that one can make it through to the other side as unscathed as best as one can.  So let’s hope that we’ve experienced the bottom of the market and that the bull market has already begun.

What do I want for my birthday?  Ah, if I told, then according to the birthday-wish tradition, those things most certainly wouldn’t come to pass.  But what I want is impossible for the moment anyway.  So I won’t dwell on wanting; instead, I’ll turn my focus to appreciating those things in my life that are already true, already make me happy and already make sense.