Month: May 2014

Hope like a Russian Dancer: Day Three & Four

By Destiny Wallingford

On May 22, 2014

In Uncategorized

Day Three and Four of my Arthritis Foundation Exercise class landed on my calendar this week. Day Three came and I did not want to go. I repeat: I did NOT want to go. Call it laziness. Call it being tired. Call it being overwhelmed by all of the ‘other things to do’ and stresses I saw in my way. Whatever. They are all excuses. I knew this… so I got my ass there, and went back again for Day Four. This is called commitment. Commitment is the antipode of an excuse; its opposite. Meaning commitment is showing up even when all factors seem to indicate the Universe is turning you over and fucking you completely in the other direction, simply because you promised to see it through. Commitment looks like not giving up on yourself when you feel like no shred or inch is left to give. Commitment acts like a Olympian who runs the course despite the blistered, bleeding feet. Commitment fills the heart with joy like two nurses who travel the southern region to give medical care to those who cannot afford it otherwise when they too do not know funds will always arrive; yet somehow, they always do. Commitment transforms what once was only hoped, to something tangible, something real.

The ironic thing about commitment is its ability to completely transform our lives; though sometimes as we walk down a path we said we signed on for, we forget this, make excuses, jump off the track, and when we do so, we lose hope. Hope in ourselves. Hope, like commitment, opposes excuses. Opposite refers to ideas or things symmetrically opposed in position, direction, or character. Hope & commitment in character, sit diametrically opposed from excuses and the energy contained behind them. They are so far apart they seem irreconcilable. In the same way as aristocrats would sit and watch country peasants perform a Russian Dance rather than participate themselves, hope twirls around excuses and lack of commitment.

I have not always been a practitioner of hope, as there have also been many more moments than I’d love to account for where I have made excuse, after bullshit excuse for myself. Bullshit is the epitome of excuses. Think about it. For one, they both stink. So as I continue to arrive at this knowing I am hit in the head similar to how I hit my Gators’ Soccer Coach with a long-drive ball, knocking him off his own two feet. Boom!

When I allow myself to reside in a place of fear, a place of excuses, a place of bullshit, I denounce the greater possibility of hope in all that is. It’s DYNAMITE. The quicker I move myself from this dwelling and into a place of COMMITMENT & REMAIN THERE, the more HOPE feeds me. Boom!

My growing into this Aha moment brought my legs out from underneath me this week, such as when a friend’s words reminded me that where there is hope there is the Divine… just when I almost didn’t show up. Push through. Commit and Persevere with Hope. These are all characters whose parts I have played before, and other times I have hung their costumes out to dry. I must say, I like myself better when I wear their clothes. I am a happier, more fulfilled me when I am the Russian Dancer. I look better. Feel better. Act better. And when all of these qualities align under this roof of mine, damn I look good.. not merely hope I do.

Day Two: It’s All Fairy Dust

By Destiny Wallingford

On May 15, 2014

In Uncategorized

Yesterday marked Day Two of my Arthritis Foundation Exercise class. I showed up again. Maybe this is in my head, though I cannot help but think some of my classmates may have been surprised I did. I did. I am staying committed. Frankly, I really enjoy the exercise curriculum, and it is proving to be a nice retreat in my days of go-go-go. Many of the exercises I perform with my eyes almost completely closed so I may zen out to the third eye. While I perform others, I occasionally catch my reflection in the classroom’s wall-long mirror. I see myself amid a wave of quite, grey, simple people, who now because of their numerical circumstance in life are perhaps leading quieter lives than they ever have before. I blend in like a contemporary sculpture in an old-world history museum. The bohemian me loves this fact. And yet what I learned about this fact on Day Two, is that it is not. It is actually all fairy dust. None of my perception is fact, rather just merely a spin – a take – on reality. Fairy Dust. We are all fairy dust. You. Me. Alrene. Bob. Joe. Suzy, Aurora, snow. Fairy dust. Particulate matter floating through the air, taking shape and form to resemble someone, something we identify with as a human being. I found myself truly realizing for the first time that my physical form, these particulates of mine, would eventually meld into a shape far different than the one casted on this Day Two. To delve deeper, all of us in the classroom share the same impermanent fate, where our sculpted design will fall back into the earth like the dust it is. Funny thing about Fairy Dust…

As my life appears to be overflowing sometimes with everything I wish to fit into it, and at the risk of sounding morbid (I think about mortality often), sometimes I battle with emotions about being able to fit it all in- my goals, my dreams, more time with the people I love before it is gone- this life and theirs. Life is so good, so sweet & precious. I yearn to hold onto it, though all the while I feel it slips away slowly ahead of me like an ironic dichotomy who laughs at my ignorant attempt to save something which cannot be saved. Unlike the way I have saved the bottle of sparkling gold fairy dust from my childhood, Halloween-prompted reenactment of Peter Pan. We were young. Innocent. My twin brothers and me. Peter Pan flew up in the canopy of the backyard tree. Hook snuck around it in attempt to find Peter, as Tink fluttered past waving her wand, leaving behind a trail of fairy dust.

The bottle resides on my nightstand, and has for what must be over twenty years now. The vessel is a time capsule for me; it takes me back to the time of Neverland, even when I forget Neverland ever even existed. The grains of gold remind me to value the TIME gifted unto us. To use the time to make beautiful memories… to enjoy the time we have. So like my youngest brother (who is as old as my fairy-filled canteen) reminded me over the telephone just moments ago… Focus on the pleasure life brings and everything else will fall into place. All of the dreams, love, sex, music, friends, fun, tears, joys, exercise, vacations, colds, and seasons will float like fairy dust to the earth, exactly where it is meant to be.

Day One

By Destiny Wallingford

In Uncategorized

Today marks Day One of a seven-class series I am partaking in for Arthritis Foundation Exercise, characterized as a low-impact streching, exercise, and aerobics program designed to address the exercise needs of individuals with arthritis. I may or may not have arthritis. I have never been formally diagnosed. I do experience popping, crackling, and various other oddities from this human vessel I reside in. My left knee flares up with aching during weather (i.e. when I visited Utah this past Christmas with twenty degree temperatures- forget it). The knee’s ipsilateral shoulder announces its presence every single day of my life with a sort of burning reminder that I am not my fourteen-year-old-former-competitive-soccer-player-self any longer… When two-a-days, or hell even three-a-days for that matter, throughout the scorching ninety degree, high-desert summers on shadeless soccer fields treated us athletes with an unrelenting fever but we stomped on anyways with our water jugs in hand. Sore wasn’t really in the vernacular then that I recall. Oh how sweet is youth! No, I am just purveyor of personal health advancement and disease prevention.

At a slightly more matured age of twenty-six, I walked into a city recreation center today and entered classroom 212 where I was the youngest by, at the very least, forty years. Dressed in black and white spandex I be-popped into the silent generation meets the baby boomers soiree. And there I was making my way back in time, only to be interrupted by the lady in the royal blue ‘STAFF’ shirt being admittedly drilled, “Who are YOU?”

“I am here for the Arthritis class,” I replied as assertively as I could hold my tongue. I indicated an individual I spoke with regarding registration instructed me to just show up. So I had. I was not on the list.

“Well do you know who you spoke with?”

“I didn’t get a name.”

“Well this class is really full.” (There appeared to be enough room to squeeze me in.) Am I being discriminated by means of sheer age I wondered… A fellow attendee cheeringly spoke up, “The more the merrier.”

And so the class began. I in the back row.

We performed many stretches. Simple body weight exercises. Utilized resistance bands. And I was the only one in the class who used the blue weights. The heavy one, at 8 pounds. A soundtrack reminiscent of old-world times carried the air. I closed my eyes as I moved through the majority of the movements. Meditation. Peace. I found bliss even, once I moved past my initial self-consciousness of being in a place I perhaps did not belong. Then I realized I have never really belonged anyway- always been an outsider, a Bohemian. So in this moment I grabbed my soul’s bootstraps and grounded myself in happiness, so content to be in the moment with my fellow classmates. We ended the hour with their ceremonial step dance to a song which rang familiar, though I could not register the name. Joyous is the state to describe how we ended day Day One.

Mrs. STAFF asked how I liked the experience. I told her very much so and as such, I would see her next week. My classmates wished me goodbye by name. So quickly, I suppose, I made the transition to belong. I belonged because I am part of a race we deem human. A race thread by the similar conditions and commonalities we share, more than the traits in which we differ. Some call this the human condition, the connection. This lesson seems to continue to present itself unto me in what I see as my self-evolution. I belong. We all do. To something greater much than perhaps we will ever completely grasp. I learned this all on Day One.

Bring on Day Two.

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