life / wellness

beyond a phase

• by kerri

change is inevitable, growth is intentional.

glenda cloud

 

[My friend Dia wrote a really fantastic blog post on positive focus earlier today, please go read it!]

I have spoken, tweeted, and e-mailed people with a slight frequency lately on the topic of “being intentional” in the last while.  It’s becoming a theme that I am trying to implement in my own life — and screwing up at rather hard, to be totally honest.  However, the fantastic thing about intentionality, is that it is ALL about choice.  And though fantastic, this freedom can make intentionality a little hard to grasp, and even harder to implement. It is hard to ask yourself myself before each choice you I make: “which of these optionss will impact me most positively?”

So what is it to be intentional? Like I said above, making the choice that will affect you the most positively in the most ways.

It is like one of those “choose the best answer” multiple choice quizzes, except without the pre-concieved negativity of how much those questions suck. We are trying to be positive in our intentionality here, are we not?

The thing is, it is often easy to identify the correct, most intentionally decided upon choice, but it is not as easy to act upon these choices.  Sometimes for me, it is easier to act upon the intentional choices with regard to perception than it is with the ones that involve action.  The other thing I am realizing is that I likely need constant reminder to make choices that are intentional. It is not enough to wake up and decide to make intentional choices.

I keep blaming circumstance. I keep saying to myself “It was so much easier to do this last semester . . .”

Why? Because of the influencers surrounding me. Physical Activity: Promotion and Adherence was, among various other things, a term-long lesson in intentionality. It is a Good Thing to be reminded a couple of times a week of not necessarily exact things, but things like Jay constantly reminding us to own the behaviour and change it.  That is a reminder that I need to give myself.

What choices was I making last term that made me more aware of these aspects? More interaction with people striving towards the same things. More intentional exercise — 45 minutes a day 4 or 5 days a week. More constant nutrition logging — not to make a big deal of it, but just to make me more conscious of what I was putting into my body. The journalling thing I mentioned in a previous post is an intentional choice I hope to carry beyond Lent, but is one that I started trying to make again last term to deal with the emotional side of things.

Honestly, just because the class ends doesn’t mean the behaviour should. Not a chance. This is, this needs to be, far beyond a phase.

Today was not a good day for intentional choice-making. From what I have eaten, to the fact that I didn’t exercise, to the negativity I have felt towards certain situations or people, I need to change this. And I know that change is good, and change is a choice.  The thing is, it is cyclical. Exercise is the cornerstone — it encourages me to eat better, it helps me effectively deal with what I am feeling. Dealing with what I am feeling prepares me better to write out the remnants of the day before I go to bed. Because of the above I sleep better. I sleep better and I can exercise a bit harder and think a bit clearer.  It is all a choice.

Start over at that moment. We all screw up. Screwing up doesn’t mean I have to wait until tomorrow for a re-do.

Own the behaviour . . . and change it.

faith / music

“and what do i know . . . what do i know of holy?”

• by kerri

and what do i know? / what do i know of holy?

–what do i know of holy?, addison road

Holy. In both the spiritual and exclamatory forms of the word.

I have never been a fan of Evanescence. I had a couple friends in high school who were big into Evanescence, and I just didn’t dig them. Which is fine, but sometimes I just want so hard to like stuff related to music.  And then one Sunday we sang Bring Me to Life in church. And I was a little more open. I like when songs that were popular music can also align into a worship experience because they are not scary and preachy.  And then Bring Me to Life got on my iPod, and I danced to it. Not only is dance one of my favourite workouts, but I love that it can be such a spiritual experience, realigning my body, my heart and my spirit by letting my mind free.

And then I wanted more.

So this? This is so close to being so much of my story in a song that I didn’t write, much like Much Like Falling and Red Sam by Flyleaf.

i tried to kill my pain / but only brought more / so much more / i lay dying / and i’m pouring crimson regret and betrayal

i’m dying, praying, bleeding and screaming / am i too lost to be saved? / am i too lost?

my God, my tourniquet / return to me salvation / my God, my tourniquet / return to me salvation

do You remember me? / lost for so long. / will You be on the other side, or will You forget me?

i long to die

my wounds cry for the grave / my soul cries for deliverance / will i be denied?

Christ, tourniquet, my suicide

–tourniquet, evanescence

 

It causes me to ask why. Why would my God keep going after me after I screwed so much up?  
So amazing.
Holy.

Jesus said to all of them, “If people want to follow me, they must give up the things they want. They must be willing to give up their lives daily to follow me. Those who want to save their lives will give up true life. But those who give up their lives for Me will have true life.“

Luke 9:23-24 [NCV]

I was not too lost. We are never too lost.

being a student / kinesiology / life

letdown.

• by kerri

I might have lost it in Physical Growth and Motor Development today if things didn’t start turning around.  It’s only Tuesday and I need this week to be over.

Those of you following me on twitter may recall the week prior to reading week I had three exams in twenty-eight hours. I started studying early, because the pressure was on. Lead-up to exams was stressful, not to mention I arrived at my Program Planning in Sport exam with mere minutes to spare after missing my bus and my mom coming to pick me up and the whole relaxation-exercise-in-the-car thing. I took all of the allotted time, and thought it went okay.  Principles of Coaching was much the same, though I left pissed off that 15~ marks were riding on my knowledge of very specific terminology and hierarchically outlined structure of the ethical decisions in sport because I had spent more time reviewing glycolysis and energy systems.  The afternoon pretty immediately following Program Planning I had Physical Growth and Motor Development, which people terrified my friend and I about. That the exam was hard and the final harder. That if we didn’t word things perfectly, we wouldn’t get the marks.

Yesterday, I received the 52% on my Principles of Coaching midterm. With a 75% on my research proposal, a research paper, and a final exam left, I am not too concerned — I have made similar comebacks in Intro Kinesiology with a worse midterm grade.  This morning I found out I got 59% on my Program Planning in Sport exam.

And this pushed me over the edge. I handed my exam back in, and went to my mom’s office, which I left blinking back tears that I finally let go once I was leaning against the locked metal stall in the main floor bathroom.

You can’t spell degree without a D [there is the humour for the post, which I am not feeling, by the way].  This scares me.  I am literally kissing any chance of getting into occupational therapy school goodbye each time I fail something since my GPA is currently too low regardless. [Note: I haven’t even failed anything yet and because I am getting D’s I am already in the failing mentality]. It’s not good enough, not good enough for a LOT of Master’s programs.
Unlike a lot of schools internationally, there’s no chance for exam rewrites. I know I still have a year-plus left, but the courses are not getting easier. The applied health courses I am actually good at are behind me, and I am facing the very harsh reality of not getting my GPA high enough to do what I want to, not to mention that the school I was seriously contemplating has for the last five years only admitted students with an A- average for the last year of undergrad.

Ironically, I am doing worse in the first and second year courses I am in than in the third year ones. Last term in my third-year courses I got A-s, and a B in second-year Issues in Sport.  To hold true, in contrast to the first-year Principles of Coaching and the second-year Program Planning in Sport, in the still second-year but as ranked harder by people I’ve met class?  That would be a 78% on my Physical Growth and Motor Development test.  (Which essentially saved me from just quitting school this afternoon after an afternoon of altercation with a group member for another class, the assignment of another group project in Motor Development, and all of the above ridiculousness.)  The voluntary withdrawal date is tomorrow, which means if I am getting out of Program Planning I have to make that decision fast or it is a done deal and is on my transcript forever.

I’ve always cared about school, but I’ve never simultaneously loved it so much and so much felt like I wasn’t able to handle it. Like there is too much going on academically, like I can’t pay attention well enough to all of the details, like I am doing too much because I want to do it all . . . like I am not good enough. Like I am trying my hardest and that isn’t good enough either.  In such a short period of time, I have never been so let down by so much stuff going on at school.

My friend Bobbi-Jo and I had a nice heart-to-heart outside the athletic centre today. Where we tried to let it go following class as I shivered.  Where we talked, laughed through the shit, hugged it out, and opened our hands towards the sky.

I’m still trying. Trying to decide what I am going to do.

Still trying to let go of the letdown.

life / wellness

thoughts on lent, wellness and trusting the process

• by kerri

I’ve started journalling again. It’s my Lent Thing this year, I think. Not that I have any serious attachments to Lent or whatever, as I am 1) not Catholic, and 2) not uber traditional, and 3) not a huge fan of the “religion” thing and 4) feeling a little more divided than usual from all my typical pondering on what it means to be a Christian, but since it kind of happened simultaneously, I think it’s a good time to be intentional about these kinds of choices.

The journalling thing was a bit of a production. The thing is, since I was like ten when I started journalling, I’ve always just used scraggly kicking-around notebooks. Apologies to anybody who bought me a diary with a lock and a pretty front at any point in my life, because they just don’t work for me. I rock the Dollarama-Notebook or the 40-Page-4-Pack-Notebook or, in the case of the notebook I pulled out yesterday, the Black-Dollarama-Notebook-That-Has-Been-Kicking-Around-My-Room-For-Over-A-Year-And-Is-Beat-Up-Before-I-Even-Started-Writing-In-It.  These are the kinds of notebooks I use, and I have no idea why.  Even when I was searching out a notebook in my abyss of a bedroom on Wednesday, I found some really nice notebooks. Like glittery flowery butterfly-y ones, but I couldn’t justify using them to journal in.

I have no idea, honestly.

The thing is, I think that this simple action has set me up for what was coming today.

First, I will start by saying that I am twenty years old and I have a financial planner.  So because of this financial planner business, I get e-mails all the time from his Events Manager [I forget her actual title] inviting me to things like free IMAX with free popcorn in exchange for attending a seminar about retirement.  These, despite the free popcorn, are the kinds of things I opt out of seeing as I have only actually had a job for two years and therefore have another at least twenty five, and a whole lot of school, to go before I retire. [I am toying with the idea of amping up my 3-year kinesiology degree to a 4-year, because this seems like a good idea, except more difficult and will take me another year to get through, at least].  So maybe considering I will be in school for the foreseeable future, it is a good thing I have this financial planner guy on my side.  He is a triathlete, so once I found that out I thought he was pretty awesome. Like “Hey, this is a guy I can trust with my money.” [I didn’t actually think that, but I mean, triathletes have to save money to maintain their bikes and buy running shoes and swim gear and consume GU and enter Ironmans and travel to Ironmans right? Anyway, triathletes are awesome.]

It turns out he has a Life Coaching-esque business on the side, and he hosted a Wellness Symposium today. Granted, if I didn’t have the background that I do, I would have had no idea that wellness is the holistic meshing of a variety of domains of health: physical, social, emotional, spiritual, environmental, occupational, because this was not explained at the symposium. So when I got the e-vite to this thing, I got my friend Tara on board and we decided to go on the notion that there might be free fruit, and there was (also my mom came too).

What does my obsession with not-pretty-notebooks have to do with this?

To summate my 2012 goals, I think this is what it is: it comes down to being intentional.  For setting myself up for success.  Over the next 40 days, my life is going to fill that notebook. The good, the bad, the questions, the decisions, the goals, the process. It’s the coming together of the choice to be intentional about what I am doing.  It’s something I feel that I need to be more focused in, and if I’ve been doing the journaling bit since I was ten [sporadically, I might admit], then it’s gotta be of some sort of therapeutic value in my life, even if subconsciously. It’s gotten me through a lot.

It’s an intentional call to be still in the midst of the chaos that is life and actually experience it for what it IS, and hopefully not what it could be. [That is another focus for another night, the being in the moment stuff. Because I am apparently becoming all wrapped up in psychology for a kinesiology major.]

It’s not about the ending, it’s about the story.

It’s about trusting the process.

health + fitness

“we got hearts of gold, but they don’t always work right”

• by kerri

–against the night, ari shine

heartfailure.jpg

I am a congenital heart defect [CHD] survivor — I had it easy. My defect, an opening between the aorta and pulmonary artery, closed by itself shortly after I was born, with the only lasting effect a slight and “innocent” heart murmur. Friends have shared stories of their CHD experiences — one who was not aware of her defect until adulthood, another who has memories and scars from childhood, but still needs to pay close attention to cardiac symptoms on a daily basis and check in with her doctors regularly. We are CHD survivors.

One of my best friends from grade two forward did not have this experience. She had multiple surgeries on her heart from the time she was young . . . and died suddenly and unexpectedly when she was twelve–in the seventh grade.  There is still work to be done.

My friend Mike is a young person living with congestive heart failure, living with day-to-day uncertainty of what will come next, and when.  Waiting for answers, and continuing on with his life while he and his team try to determine the next steps.  Longing for answers and options.

This weekend, my best friend’s dad had a moderate-to-massive heart attack.  Things are rough for them, so please pray or send vibes their way.  Life will never be the same for her dad or their family. There is a lot of desperation, a lot of prayer, a lot of tears . . . and a lot of hope. The story is still being written.

Our stories are all different.  Yet we live with “hearts of gold that don’t always work right“.

. . . Without anything to say about it. It has little to nothing to do with our choice, it’s all chance.  Our hearts choose our realities.

We do our best to live.  Hope. Love. Run. Laugh.

We do our best to fight.

February is Heart Month.

Join the fight.