“The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.”
Why 40 Hikes before I turn 40:
Part 2 - “Making Time”
"I have a therapy appointment at 9 which means that will go until to 10, which means that after I get my after therapy drink I will have two and a half hours to get to lunch with the friend I am meeting from out of town.
No. Not two and a half. Closer to a flat two because I am currently in the southwest quadrant of Northwest Arkansas and I have agreed to meet her in the northwest quadrant and even though the majority of the population of this tiny metropolis don’t think about this place in quadrants, it still takes a full 45 minutes to jump from the south to the north; I must account for traffic.
This is a glimpse into the steps that I go through to actually decide what trail, how far, how hard, and how sweaty I’m okay with my body getting… oh wait. We haven’t talked about my aversion to sweat yet? We’ve got 40 of these essays. We will get there. I promise.
However, convuluted the process described above is, it’s actually the easy part. That’s simply the scheduling algebra that any adult does when faced with a certain set of constraints. I would argue that the doing is easy, it’s the deciding that’s hard.
When I started this project, I had recently made the decision to have a hard stop on one career path while not knowing what the next step held. After following hard toward a career in the legal field for the previous few years, I found myself at a place of deep uncertainty about more than my next “career move.” What I saw as my failure in decision making had led me to doubt my internal knowing. I felt emotionally blinded: Which of the thoughts and emotions racing through one’s head are worthy of my trust? Which should/ must be ignored?
On top of that I’m a four on the enneagram. As author, speaker, and wise woman Susanne Stabile has taught through her work, “a four is able to think about their feelings and have feeling about what they’re thinking.” According to what she teaches, en enneagram four is “doing deficient.” The way she explains it is that when getting stuck in both their thinking heads and emotional hearts, a four is often paralyzed with indecision and inaction.
But the good news is this, y’all: I’m 39. I have almost forty years and and at least six different of my own mini-lifetimes of experiences from which to glean. I don’t know a lot but I am intimately aware of what I historically do. And because you’re not here to hear me talk lots about lots of heartache and hurt, what I historically do is this: Nothing. Inaction. Stuckness.
Let’s think: I have a history of getting stuck, a personality make-up that often leads to inaction, and a big question mark of a future in front of me that looks like crying at home in my fuzzy socks, not having brushed my hair in three days. Nope nope nope. I could picture it too clearly; I couldn’t allow myself to do it.
So before my two-week notice had run its course, I was creating the “Paige’s Plan to Volunteer and Reconnect with the World at Large” manifesto. There was a big hand made calendar on our kitchen wall; I was arranging lunches, making plans to help my brother’s organization with their big state meeting, getting back on mailing lists I had unsubscribed to years before, texting folks who may or may not have thought I had fallen off the planet… which was all well and good until on my last day of work I came down with whatever bug had been chasing my family all summer. I spent the better part of the next week in bed with fever and muscle aches and a cough that, (unbeknownst to me at the time) would still be hanging around a month later. And while my big volunteer energy was still there, no one wanted the woman that sounded like she might lose a lung during her lunch break.
Again, I was discouraged? I’m trying to do the right thing! I’m trying to not get stuck in the dark cloud that is my own head. And now even my body is working against me?
It turns out that the Universe did want me act. But not with the energy of a manic social butterfly who was actively sending out “desperation for anything you might have available” pheromones. More on that to come…
Here are the trail details:
Tatamagouche Trail, Bentonville, AR.
2.54 miles
Hiked: August 07, 2023.
For more information: Check out my notes on AllTrails for the Tatamagouche Trail, Bentonville, AR.
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