Storylines

I have a standing running date on Tuesday evenings with my friend, Jodie. She finds a “Bradleysitter,” we keep the calendar open, and we run. We also talk. A lot. We are old acquaintances but new friends, and we are discovering the things that make being friends easy for us and are marveling that it happens so easily. If only all relationships could be this way. But then I remember that most relationships I have chosen to have in my life did start this way. They started because somewhere, somehow, my story and someone else’s story intersected or paralleled, merged. And we chose to tell our stories together.

But not all relationships are like that.

We talked a lot tonight about the difficult relationships in our lives. The ones we haven’t chosen, but that have been chosen for us. Those are the merging stories in my life with fragmented or stalled plot lines, stagnant dialogue, characters with internal dialogue so loud it drowns out any hope of beautiful, eloquent external dialogue. They are the relationships I am least proud of, but the ones that are still teaching me the most. Too often, they are the ones so broken, we humans can’t even begin to figure out how to edit or revise them to make them once again workable.

I used to think those broken relationships in my life rendered my story broken as well. I used to think my story didn’t matter. I am learning more and more that it matters in a way I can’t even begin to comprehend. It was given to me as a gift, and the way and with whom I choose to share it, is my gift to give. It is all I have, this story. When I am gone, there will be no children or grandchildren to tell my story. It will live only in the way it mingled with and enriched someone else’s. I know, it can be hard to believe our stories matter that much.

So I shared my story tonight on our run. A short chapter really, but an important one—as they all somehow manage to be. And I learned Jodie has a similar chapter in her own story. And tonight, we ran parallel to each other, two people on the same path. But our stories merged. And maybe our stories were a little easier to tell because we were running. Because running has a way of stripping away the words that matter least, letting us get to the heart of the story. And it makes me wish I could take more people running. Maybe then we could read each other’s lives the way we all wish we could share them: stripped of the junk that bows our shoulders, with deep inhalations, a generous warm up, with laughter and no shame when we struggle, and a high five at the end because we ran through the hard part together.