How This Christmas will Look

Walking from my bedroom to the kitchen the other day I noticed a strange emotion bubbling forth. It was joy. Christmas songs playing, my oven warm from baking and suddenly I began to cry.

It has been well over 20 years since the Christmas season has elicited joy in my heart. Poisoned darts of sugar plums and smiling Santas ripe with tainted children’s tears. I have filled our stockings and wrapped our gifts followed by defeated puffs of contempt and misery. Yep, that is what over 20 years of Christmases have looked like at our house.

It is a sad reality that parents only realize the damage they have done to their children once it has already been done and the only thing left to wrap up with shiny new paper and glittering bows are apologies. Rubbed off the edge with the side of an old penny found at the bottom of my washing machine, I believe I discovered an expiration date from a decade too far gone to remember on that last “I’m sorry” from last year’s cards I threw away.

My go-to excuse has been my chronic, life-long depression. It’s true, I do have chronic depression and it does wreak havoc and does cause anger and sadness and words that should never be said. But we are all born with the same ability to make decisions and choose a path and take a breath and put a clean piece of gauze on a gaping, bleeding wound.

But this year, in the midst of my havoc and anger I have found a new outlook in the unlikeliest of places – cycling class.

The first week of class I thought I would die. But then something happened. A.J., on my right, started saying “no quit, no quit.” Soon Jenny, on my left, was following suit and quietly under my breath I said it too.

On my way home that night, sweat-soaked and red-faced I developed a love-hate relationship with this class on the second floor of a bicycle shop off College Ave. And I went back the next night, because Jenny was expecting me and said I would and I don’t like to be a quitter. And it cost money.

Soon one week moved into the next. Mike teaching one class and then Craig or Pete and finally Mary and Conor two nights a week. At first I liked one class over another but by week three every class was the same small community of regular cyclers. And they encouraged me. And they repeated words that kept my legs moving and they counted down the time left in the red zone and they cheered me on and before I could let my negativity flood the plain of this last month of the year I learned something… because we are always learning something and even when we think we know it all and it will never change, it does.

This year I am reminded, once again, that it is a community of people that keep me going. Oftentimes it ends up being people that have no obligation to do so. But they do. Because that’s what people do.

 There are many different versions of the definition of “community” but they all involve people who share a common goal and in doing so each person becomes better. I have become better this year because I stayed in the red zone longer than I ever thought possible and now I am in better shape.

But the most important thing I learned is that if I repeat the words I need the most, when I need them most, I have the real ability to overcome, and change my brain, and change my focus.

For some people those words are a prayer to God in heaven and sometimes they are simply “keep moving, keep moving.”  I know it works because this year I tried it. And now not only have I kept moving, I am moving forward.