A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

This is something of a mantra for me. Good old Lao Tzu. I tend to become impatient with the boring parts of life, and want to skip ahead, which is the worst kind of extravagance, to wish away time and life experience. Not the boring parts of life like sitting on my ass watching six straight hours of House on DVD; I can spend lots of time on that. No, I lose patience with the parts of life where you have to practice something and suck at it while you work up to getting good at it.

I recently started running - again, for about the third time - since doing my half marathon last year and injuring myself. It's not a bad injury, it's the kind that you can come back from if you're very, very attentive to stretching. Every single day. I vowed I was going to give myself extra time to train this year, to reduce the chances of re-injury. An extra six or eight weeks should do it, I figured. But now that cushion is gone, dithered away with too much work and time spent watching House, and now I have exactly as much training time left as I had last year. I'm huffing my way through 3-mile runs, and my knee hurts.

However, I keep telling myself: A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. My inspiration is the robin who lives in our carport. For two or three years she lived in the same nest, in the rafters of the carport, and successfully raised two broods of young each year. This year, after the first brood, I came out one day and found the nest on the ground. No sign of wee birdies. We don't know if a cat came along and knocked it down, perhaps even doing in the wee ones, or if it was just the wind. We put it back up, but it wouldn't stay. There was no sign of Mamma Robin anyway. We finally threw the nest away.

Then, this weekend while I was away in Oregon, she came back and rebuilt her nest. The whole thing, in three days' time. It's just a nice as the old one, even nicer really because the grass and hay and such looks fresh and clean. She's in there sitting a new future brood. Just like that. No whining. No excuses about how her IT band hurts too much to build a new nest, or she's too tired, or she's just going to watch one more episode of House and eat a few cookies, and then get right on that nest-building thing.

So she's my inspiration. That big, beautiful nest out there started out as one strand of grass, and then another, and another. I do hope, though, that she got a nice little vacation during that time she was away. A trip to Cabo, a girls' weekend at the spa. Something to rejuvenate her.