Celebrating the Glimmers
Willow Blooms #21 The small things matter the most
Whilst big and significant things are happening in the world, with life altering effects on people, the lens with which I choose to focus here seems relatively small. Willow Blooms is one way in which I seek and encourage connection, creativity and depth to enhance our wellbeing. I am not blind to the bigger things, but my Substack writing brings me joy, helping me to feel steady on our stormy seas. I hope it has a similar effect on you and welcome any feedback. I’d love to keep growing my readership. I invite you to share this with anyone you think would like to read it. Thank you for joining me!
A little while ago I wrote an article about parkrun, after one of the regulars at my local event reached her 100 milestone. I celebrated her success and shared my appreciation of the event. I don’t think you don’t need to have read it to enjoy this one, but if you haven’t read it and would like to, or would like to learn more about the parkrun event, you can access it via this link.
There was a moment this morning that I woke to the sound of heavy rain, and I thought I would spend my morning tucked up in bed, but then the weather settled. In response, I eased myself from under the covers and joined the local parkrun pack gathering at the start.
Milestone run
It felt good today. By the second lap there was a little group ahead of me, and because we were running at a similar pace, I found myself quietly tucking myself in behind them. My local parkrun route is four laps, and as we trundled around successive loops, few words were exchange. I enjoyed the relative quiet with the rhythmic plods of feet on the ground, and the congratulations and bell ringing from the marshals.
On the last lap, a runner came from behind and passed us all. As she cut back into the path and eased further ahead, I commented on the extra gear she’d found. ‘I’m done’, she replied. Yet her body clearly thought otherwise and she pulled further away, speeding out of earshot.
With less than quarter of the final lap to go, a man just in front of me started slowing down. As the distance between us reduced further I called out without thinking, and said something along the lines of,
‘Not far to go. You’ve got this, keep going!’
His pace increased, and he pulled further away again. There is joy in seeing people doing their best, not just in overtaking them!
By now the little group I’d been running in had spread out and I was running on my own. With only two corners to go, I found an unusual extra half-gear to take me into the finish. A gentle slope leads down to the final corner and towards the finish tunnel, so even if you don’t have a sprint finish, the slope takes you with it. Coming into the funnel, I crossed the line completing my 100th parkrun.
A moment or so later a man came to chat with me. He asked if it was me who’d called out to him on the last stretch, and I said that I was. He thanked me, and it led to a conversation about what keeps us going when the going gets tough. He told me about his experience of the running method used in Couch to 5k. I have never followed the Couch to 5k programme so I don’t know exactly what it contains, but it is a running plan designed to support people to become more active, and specifically to achieve the goal of running a 5km run. The programme gradually builds stamina, fitness, and confidence through a combination of walking and running, and can be done individually or in groups. A group in our area marks the end of the course with a group run at parkrun, celebrating everyone’s achievement.
To train, alternating between walking and running can be helpful. Following the same routine of running for a short period of time, then taking a timed walking rest break can make the increasing distances seem more manageable. It becomes mentally easier to break up the distance, focussing on the next break rather than the end point. Physiologically it undoubtedly helps to build in natural rest points, allowing heart rate recovery time. However, others can find the walk / run transitions more difficult than maintaining one pace. I don’t know the research on this, but starting and stopping running requires a burst of motivation at each transition point. Shifting down from running to walking pace also invites the temptation to slow down further to the point of stopping! When feeling tired, the shift back up to running pace requires monumental effort. Doing this over and over can be exhausting! It’s a technique I used when I was training for a challenging event, and I found it helpful, though a level of trust in the process, and its benefits is certainly required.
Perhaps these motivational bursts, and having comfort in changes in pace are what the Couch to 5k process is training people to tolerate and then master? After all it is not our ability to run 5k that pulls us off the sofa or out of bed on a windy rainy day, but the burst of motivation required to do so. The repeated experience of motivating yourself to shift from walking to running in the early stages of the couch to 5k programme, perhaps develops the neural pathways, muscle memory and self-belief to support this, especially for people who don’t enjoy the running itself so have less experience of the benefit of adrenaline quickly kicking in… Some people prefer to just to keep going at one pace, accepting that although they might overtake the people taking a walking rest up the hills, they soon get overtaken once back on the flat.
As most of us are not professional athletes at parkrun, it doesn’t matter too much which of these methods we choose, what matters is that we keep getting out, and that we enjoy it. It was interesting to talk about this with the parkrunner. Later I wondered whether a similar question holds true for all situations- figuring out what best supports our motivation muscle?!
Celebrating achievements!
I have run parkrun since 2013 and am proud to have reached this milestone. Although I no longer run races, I still like to find a willing path to hold my feet, and a little pack of people that I can join the back of. I have done more parkruns in the four years since Covid than I did in the 7 years before it and get much more out of going now. As I wrote in my previous parkrun article, I highly value the community, and the random conversations that spark up each week.
So thank you parkrun, and…
Self-care
When I got home, my mind considered the ‘to do list’, and how much is on it, cautioning me against the seeming indulgence of my desire to lounge on the sofa for a brief rest. This inner voice is responsible for the struggles and conflicting demands that can get in the way of our self care, telling us something else is more important than our basic and surely non-negotiable needs.
When our minds take us away from doing the things that we need, we can find creative ways for our imaginations to work with us instead of against us! I don’t condone violence in the physical world, but what if I imagined myself giving this pesky part of me a kick in the shins? That might be satisfying. And what might a kinder, playful response be? I imagined giving them a treat, something like a melty cone of ice cream, so they have to use both hands and look away from the list. Maybe the list got covered up with ice cream. It can be cleaned up later, but just for now none of the tasks can be seen or done… We all find our own strategies!
I rested for a bit, the equivalent of taking a walk break to break up the running we often find ourselves caught up in in life.
Appreciating the small things, for they are not really small at all
As I was contemplating how to tie this piece up, I clicked on a tab to open a poem that I’d saved for later- Kae Tempest’s Simple Things, from their 2023 collection Divisible By Itself And One. It’s beautiful to listen to them performing it. Kae never shies away from the reality of the struggles of our age, and encourages depth, creativity and connection to bring us through them (Read more about this in their book On Connection, 2020). In Simple Things Kae celebrates life’s simple moments, the things that we might not even notice, but which form the fabric of our lives and stitches our relationships together.
‘there was always…’ they repeat, encouraging us to look, to see, and to appreciate it all.
I won’t tell you more because the enjoyment is in the listening. I urge you to click here, then close your eyes to listen; once, twice, maybe three times over. (Ignore that voice saying ‘no, you don’t have time’. Maybe play with your imagination to do whatever silences it for now!) It’s only short but as there’s a lot of depth to take in, it benefits from multiple listening. Then, after listening, go back and watch the video. See the shift to joy on Kae’s face as they read. Tell me whether it moves you, and whether you think you’d get all that from reading it on the page! I know I wouldn’t.
Because I had listened before, this time I continued typing as Kae performed. Once finished, YouTube did its thing of running onto the next video and I was suddenly accompanied by the soothing voice of Helena Bonham Carter, introducing an EE Cummings poem.
‘I carry your heart with me’, she said.
I stopped typing and closed my eyes, imagining Helena sitting beside me, reading to me, and carrying my heart!
Two differently beautiful readings, the contrast emphasising the gold in each.
Then suddenly,
‘But I can’t’, Helena said urgently. YouTube had moved onto a reading of WH Auden, lurching me from romantic lyricism back into reality. Helena continued;
‘Will time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you, I would let you know.'
What is this about, I wondered, and I looked it up. Dr Oliver Tearle’s analysis provides an interesting explanation, and surely the poem is as relevant now as when written, post-WW2 recovery.
a poem at once about being certain of nothing (except that the speaker would tell us the truth if he had the answers) in a time of uncertainty (except that we can be certain that there ‘must be’ reasons why things happen, even though we don’t know what they are).’
A Short Analysis of W. H. Auden’s ‘If I Could Tell You’, Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Are we all certain that there ‘must be’ reasons why things happen? I think it depends on your perspective what that reason is. Fate or self determinism? Spiritual paths or earthly journeys? Meaning that we construct, or meaning that we discover? It does not all seem simple and certain to me. This existential questioning has been the stuff of debate for eons, and society certainly does not have it all figured out, or surely there would not still be so much distress and conflict?
I won’t always know the answers, but I believe in the benefits of reading poetry aloud, as I wrote in my article celebrating Michael Mosley’s life. The emotional content of the poem is critical. Get it right, and a YouTube chain of poems has the potential to provide the type of nervous system glimmers written about by Deb Dana in The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation (2018). Glimmers cue safety to our nervous systems, often involving moments of joy and connection. Our autonomic nervous system shifts from sympathetic activation, to rest and repair / rest and digest parasympathetic states. Over time, glimmers help us put the break on an overactive threat system.
We all have different things that act as glimmers. Kae’s poem likely tells us the things that glimmer for them. Their poem also worked for me. In case you didn’t stop to listen earlier, here’s the link to Kae again if you’d like to experience it. I can’t be sure that your algorithms will take you on the same soothing YouTube journey from there, but that’s the fun of uncertainty, right? You get to forge or find our own way, going at whatever pace works best for you.
Congratulations on whatever achievements you have to celebrate this week. These glimmers keep us smiling. What else has this effect on you?
We often forget how hard our brain works for us, and like the rest of our body that it has limits and gets tired. I’ve ticked one thing off the to do list, and I’ll get to the rest of it all in good time. It’s time to take a brain break. xx