Everything at Once

On the Trail

The engine cuts out and I start to notice quiet and stillness in the darkness before sunrise. There’s a kind of weight in that moment. I stay in the driver’s seat, ten feet from the trailhead, still running the checks. How much sleep, what the joints are doing, whether the fatigue is baseline or the kind that means something.

Every step is already measured against what’s been spent.

Somewhere around mile two, the math stops working. This is where the internal monologue usually kicks in:

nobody cares, get it done, rub dirt in it, you’ll be fine.

Not today, depletion runs deeper than the performance and then one step lands wrong. Not pain, just a hollow misfire you can’t quite negotiate and there it is. The familiar resignation. Here we go, something is about to give, again.

The Flare

I didn’t get to that trail on a good streak. It was the tail end of a prolonged flare, the kind that simply stops everything. Days where going outside aren’t even on the table. When getting out of bed to eat is a negotiation I was already losing before it started.

Raw. Stripped. Grieving.

Just when you think you’re on the way back up, you start thinking you’re onto something. Not remission, possibly some predictability, maybe a little stability.

Reality appears, it puts you face down dick in the dirt. Back to less than zero. And you’re there long enough to do the math.

Flare days get counted, patterns get tracked, trying to prove some level of stability. Then it breaks open when you actually look at it. You’re not crashing as hard as you could be, but you’re sure as hell not holding steady either.

Either way, there’s a cost, and I went all in on that trade.

Stopping isn’t neutral, it means handing over the keys.

I don’t always know if I’m running toward something or just refusing to stop.

Not Inspiration

I was worn down, no buffer left. That’s when I watched Rob Shaver in The Life We Have. Twenty years into bone cancer, three years into a daily running streak between recurrences — some days less than a mile, some days a marathon. Still trying when the fourth recurrence made it nearly impossible. He talks about being grateful for your body every day. All of them, even the hard ones. Saying he’s trying to squeeze everything he can out of his body while he still has it.

It wasn’t inspirational. It was confronting. I know that edge.

It's calendared mortality. The next lab, biopsy, or scan could be the one that changes everything.

Not if. Inevitable. Every drop, while there’s something left to squeeze.

I’m not trying to get better. I’m trying to live while I still can, before the math changes in ways I can’t negotiate. That’s the actual trade, the one under every step past mile two.

And Rob wasn’t performing any of it. No arc, no redemption, no lesson. Just a man in a body that’s running out of road, squeezing hard, not pretending otherwise.

Not inspiration. Recognition.

Someone else living a similar impossible calculation and not hiding the cost of it. Whatever was between me and the truth dissolved in that moment.

Everything at Once

Joy and Pain. Effort and clarity. Cost and access. Grief and gratitude...

Not the soft kind, the kind with teeth. It knows exactly what it’s up against. Not better instead of worse.

Just everything at once.

The noise drops out, nothing resolves, and the body still hurts. The day still asks more than it should. But the edges stop shifting, and the whole truth shows up at the same time — the cost, the pull forward, and the quiet light through the trees that shouldn’t matter but does anyway.

Me still here inside it.

Connective Tissue:

→ Aliveness at the Edge
→ Fieldcraft for the Feral Generation
→ Addiction as Fieldcraft

Related:

→ The Accent of Self‑Blame
→ The Dance of Memory and Mirror
→ Before There Were Practices

← Back to Inner Trailcraft

* peer reflections: not medical or therapy advice. *