"You look wider"
I knew it was going to be an interesting day as soon as I heard those words.
Just a few minutes prior, I had to swallow the pride and choose the next size up for the fab suit to accommodate my additional summer pounds. So, the above observation is not entirely unexpected but it stung me just the same. It got me thinking- oh yeah, I am at my heaviest in 6 years! Wait- how did that happen?! It got me on the defensive- stupid summer sickness meant I could not workout, and no time for workout when shuttling the kid from a thousand camps! And then, it also got me feeling sorry for myself- I just let it happen. I am officially a schlump :(.
To distract my sorry self, I peeked into social media. A lot of memories shared out there about 9/11. Story of the brave CEO of Akamai technologies that went down fighting, the first victim of that day's terrorism. Picture of the guy who jumped out the North tower in vain to save his life. People paying their respects to many others, to their untold stories and to the abrupt ends. My mind diverted to my own recollection of that day 14 years ago- I remember being convinced that a plane was soon going to come crashing on my College of Engineering at FSU. I remember it being an extremely muggy day, not that we needed the weather to cause more perspiration to that already caused by the events of that morning. With my mind racing along these thoughts, I should have paused to remember that I weighed more in grad school 14years ago than I do now. I guess my subconscious mind too found such an observation trivial in comparison to its most current thoughts.
While still browsing on social media, I caught the details of the shocking death of an acquaintance from college. A very nice guy in his mid-thirties, admired and cherished by everyone in his friends list and beyond, dies of a fatal cardiac arrest in his sleep at 2am. He apparently had no pre-existing condition whatsoever to explain it. The harsh reality of the unexpectedness of life hit me hard. It made me feel embarrassed for my worrying about the extra summer pounds.
Later in the day, a coworker asked me how my biking was going. He had an inexplicable look of confusion on his face as I told him I have not been riding at all. I think the giant scoop of cold stone creamery poison I had in my hands really drove my point home (we had an ice cream social at work yesterday). I got an email from another coworker wondering why I had zero miles logged in the September bike challenge. I just let loose a chuckle. There is no way I was going to ride 330miles this September like I did the prior years.
It was only fitting when the husband decided to play one of Neil Degrass Tyson's shows on TV to unwind at night. If one were to fit the 14 billion years of cosmic evolution into one calendar year, man was not even born until the final 15 seconds of the last minute of the last day of the cosmic year (us humans didn't exist until 11:59:45PM on December 31st!). We are all made of the same cosmic dust- the Oxygen of our breathing air, the Carbon of our tissue, the Calcium in our bones and the Iron in our blood- all thanks to coalescence of starry matters. I just happened to walk around with a speck more of that dust than I did one hundred billionth of a second ago. Me, that speck of starry dust, would disappear before the cosmic clock turns to the next millionth of a second.
I am not just glad I am wider today. I am glad I am. Period. Now let me see if I can dust off that old bike of mine, :)
I knew it was going to be an interesting day as soon as I heard those words.
Just a few minutes prior, I had to swallow the pride and choose the next size up for the fab suit to accommodate my additional summer pounds. So, the above observation is not entirely unexpected but it stung me just the same. It got me thinking- oh yeah, I am at my heaviest in 6 years! Wait- how did that happen?! It got me on the defensive- stupid summer sickness meant I could not workout, and no time for workout when shuttling the kid from a thousand camps! And then, it also got me feeling sorry for myself- I just let it happen. I am officially a schlump :(.
To distract my sorry self, I peeked into social media. A lot of memories shared out there about 9/11. Story of the brave CEO of Akamai technologies that went down fighting, the first victim of that day's terrorism. Picture of the guy who jumped out the North tower in vain to save his life. People paying their respects to many others, to their untold stories and to the abrupt ends. My mind diverted to my own recollection of that day 14 years ago- I remember being convinced that a plane was soon going to come crashing on my College of Engineering at FSU. I remember it being an extremely muggy day, not that we needed the weather to cause more perspiration to that already caused by the events of that morning. With my mind racing along these thoughts, I should have paused to remember that I weighed more in grad school 14years ago than I do now. I guess my subconscious mind too found such an observation trivial in comparison to its most current thoughts.
While still browsing on social media, I caught the details of the shocking death of an acquaintance from college. A very nice guy in his mid-thirties, admired and cherished by everyone in his friends list and beyond, dies of a fatal cardiac arrest in his sleep at 2am. He apparently had no pre-existing condition whatsoever to explain it. The harsh reality of the unexpectedness of life hit me hard. It made me feel embarrassed for my worrying about the extra summer pounds.
Later in the day, a coworker asked me how my biking was going. He had an inexplicable look of confusion on his face as I told him I have not been riding at all. I think the giant scoop of cold stone creamery poison I had in my hands really drove my point home (we had an ice cream social at work yesterday). I got an email from another coworker wondering why I had zero miles logged in the September bike challenge. I just let loose a chuckle. There is no way I was going to ride 330miles this September like I did the prior years.
It was only fitting when the husband decided to play one of Neil Degrass Tyson's shows on TV to unwind at night. If one were to fit the 14 billion years of cosmic evolution into one calendar year, man was not even born until the final 15 seconds of the last minute of the last day of the cosmic year (us humans didn't exist until 11:59:45PM on December 31st!). We are all made of the same cosmic dust- the Oxygen of our breathing air, the Carbon of our tissue, the Calcium in our bones and the Iron in our blood- all thanks to coalescence of starry matters. I just happened to walk around with a speck more of that dust than I did one hundred billionth of a second ago. Me, that speck of starry dust, would disappear before the cosmic clock turns to the next millionth of a second.
I am not just glad I am wider today. I am glad I am. Period. Now let me see if I can dust off that old bike of mine, :)
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