Yesterday morning at 4:47, my eighty-seven-year-old mother woke me.
She was disoriented. Confused. Struggling to form words. She kept telling me she didn't feel well.
I've seen this before when her blood sugar drops, so I made her tea and toast, gave her a full-sugar ginger ale and a Rice Krispies Treat. I even had to feed her because she was so weak. For a few minutes she seemed to come back. Then I helped her to the bathroom.
She thought she was using the toilet but had no idea she'd urinated in her Depends.That's when I knew this wasn't low blood sugar. I called the paramedics. Before they left the house, they asked me for the Do Not Resusitate document on the refrigerator and told me they would be rolling with lights and sirens.
In all the years the paramedics have come to Mom's house, they'd never asked for the DNR.
They'd never told me they were leaving with lights and sirens. That got my attention. After making sure the cats had food and grabbing a quick breakfast, I headed to the hospital. I stayed with Mom until five o'clock that afternoon. She was admitted with pneumonia. Multiple antibiotics. A long list of tests.
Life happens.
I'm not special.
I recognize that life happens to everyone. This isn't a story about hardship. It's a story about what we choose to protect when hardship arrives. When I finally got home, the day wasn't over. The cats still needed feeding. Dinner still needed making. A Tuesday’s Standard essay still needed editing and publishing. My brother called and wanted to talk. An hour later I looked at my watch. Eight o'clock. No workout.
I train first thing in the morning because the gym at eight o'clock at night is a zoo. Crowded. Noisy. Exactly the environment I've spent the last year intentionally avoiding. Every reasonable excuse told me to skip it. Nobody would have questioned that decision. The thing that scares me most isn't a hard day.
It's drift.
Drift never arrives all at once.
It slips in through a side door and quietly compounds. One missed workout becomes permission for the next one. A skipped meal becomes a pattern. One morning where I decide to skip my hour of silence becomes two mornings... then a week... then, before I know it, I'm becoming someone I never intended to become.
I won't pretend I didn't think about the almond croissant sitting in the kitchen. I did. I also thought about skipping the gym. Both choices would have made the next thirty minutes easier.Neither would have made tomorrow morning easier. I've learned that the conversations I have with myself the day after I break a promise are far harder than the workout I was trying to avoid. So I took a shower. Put on my gym clothes. Drove to a gym I normally avoid at that hour.
One of the trainers looked at me and smiled.
"What are you doing here this late?"
"I've had one of those days," I said.
"I needed to come here and decompress."
That was the truth. The workout wasn't punishment. It was protection. Protection against drift. Protection of the standards I'd spent the last year building.Discipline got me through the gym door. Resilience stopped one difficult day becoming a difficult week.Courage is writing this from a hospital room instead of pretending yesterday was easier than it was.
We grow in the space between who we are today and who we're willing to become.
That space is called discomfort.
Most people spend their lives trying to avoid it.
I've learned that's exactly where the growth lives.
How I speak to myself in moments like these becomes how I experience myself. How I experience myself becomes how I see myself. And how I see myself determines how I walk through the rest of my life.
Life happens.
The standard remains.
Until next time, Bill
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