Busy, busy

Autumn really is the time when things go back to being busy. I don’t feel like summer was that lazy, or hazy (and if you’re me, “crazy” doesn’t distinguish that particular season from any other), but somehow the fall has become ridiculously scheduled. I guess it doesn’t contribute to an idyllic, slow pace when you teach two courses online, take on a consulting and an editing gig, travel to Virginia to do a seminar, spend your free time preparing for the World Team Trials but preparing more humanely than you prepared for the last tournament while still incorporating into your game all the incredibly useful moves your instructor gave you, and still want to figure out how to write a book based on your experiences leaving behind a life that was so busy and rushed that it didn’t feel like your own. (Wait a minute…) And I haven’t even been to CrossFit this week because I am tapering before the tournament.

Now, I’m not complaining. Even though this schedule is making me flash on my former life, it’s still the result of my own choices, and my choices are far more mindful than they used to be. I know exactly what I’m getting myself into. Knowing this doesn’t make things less hectic, but it does make it easier for me to get completely behind those choices, which in my opinion means I am living my life with more integrity than I used to.

Okay on the heels of my big speech about integrity, it’s time to admit that I lied. I do want to complain a little bit. But then I’ll get over it and do what I need to do. I’m just a little stressed, about getting the courses up and running, about training, about competing. It’s Wednesday before a tournament, which according to my schedule means I should be sitting in a corner rocking gently back and forth questioning my very existence, catastrophizing that if I do poorly at the tournament it will mean I have absolutely no grappling skills or even any loveable qualities at all. But today I don’t have the time. I’ll have to shift the schedule a bit and wig out tomorrow instead. And that will require that I juggle the rest of my pre-tournament schedule. Somehow I’ll have to fit in not sleeping, feeling frustrated while rolling, having dreams when I do sleep, joking incessantly to cover up my insecurities, and wondering why the hell I put myself through the whole competition experience.

I want to write about how great my weekend in Richmond was: we trained, we CrossFitted, we ate, we seminared, we watched the UFC, and most importantly, we laughed our asses off. I’ll get that up sooner or later.