Not just a song by the Eagles (‘f***ing Eagles, man’), not just something I remember my dad saying, but my approach to my two miles this morning. I woke up feeling washed out, my muscles and joints loose but not really limber, not feeling any energy surge at the beginning of the day; I walked most of my two miles, then, and it was comfortable and beautiful (though few things are as beautiful my crack-of-dawn run, real run, yesterday morning). I walked and watched what was going on around me, ran a few paces when I felt like it, and satisfied my felt need to keep my body moving first thing in the morning.
I process emotion in complicated ways, and I had been holding on to a lot of stress and tension between my sister Holly’s death in April and the Mass of Requiem I said for her yesterday morning, with a dear handful of the faithful from St Helen’s. For all my dissatisfied suspicion about the discourse of needing closure, yesterday’s Mass was the correct, fitting cadence to the protracted interval of suspended grief and tension.