Acceptance

“Why do you stay in prison / when the door is so wide open? /Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. / Live in silence.” - Jalal ad-Din Rumi

Last Friday's long run was by far the most unpleasant one I've had in a long, long time.

The alarm went off early. I was recovering nicely from my cold, but still tired. The humidity was approximately 157%. I begrudgingly headed to the Duke cross country course, took a deep breath of the soupy air, turned my iPod way up, and started putting one foot in front of the other.

The rolling course was particularly hard; my pace was particularly slow (not to mention I was immediately soaking wet); and I was angry -- at myself, at the day, at the weather. With every step, I was fighting. The harder I fought, the more I obsessed about all of the things I couldn't control, the louder my negative self chatter got, the tougher the run became.

C'mon Rob, you know better than this.....

Then, at the beginning of Sunday's swim, I felt a similar grumpiness: This warm-up has too many drills. I hate drills. 200 repeats? Yuck. This is not gonna be fun. Why did I wait so late in the afternoon to to this. I hate afternoon workouts.

Then, I remembered my goals for the rest of this year. I stopped fighting and chose acceptance. Immediately, the workout started to fly by.

Families new to Genesis Home often go through a similar process. They come into the program knowing that a lot needs to change in their lives, but the structure, rules, expectations are all new -- and sometimes pretty tough to swallow. The families that are most successful in moving themselves out of homelessness are those that accept all that Genesis Home has to offer.