Running in Florida

I’m back in Napa. I just got home from spending a couple weeks in Florida where I stayed at a resort I hadn’t been to since high school. When I was there the first time at sixteen, I would wake up early in the morning and jog around the lagoon as many times as I could. It was track season and I had to focus, feel the burn, and run fast! Faster, Tyler! Move it! I love the competition, but this trip there was no one around timing me so I let my mood set my pace and how many times I circled the lagoon. Beautiful.

Lately I spend more time thinking forward than back, but running around a lagoon that had disappeared from my consciousness for over ten years brought back all the thoughts of a sixteen-year-old. Or maybe it was so easy to remember myself at that age because there were two hundred cheerleaders staying at the same resort. Not that I was ever a cheerleader. Nothing against the girls, but I had the same thoughts these past weeks that I did when I was in high school. Why would I want to be on the sidelines cheering? I’d much rather play. Give me a volleyball and I’ll be happy.

Running round and round the lagoon in Florida brought back thoughts I had buried somewhere over the years and I was surprised when they came back with each turn of the water’s edge. Maybe it’s immaturity or misconceptions of what I thought age was and what it would bring, but I realized so far I’ve been all wrong. Nothing has changed inside of me. None of my hopes, dreams or plans. I’ve had several detours from the sixteen-year-old Tyler’s path, some good, some not, but really no matter which way I go my core is my own. I was just listening to a song where the singer talks about how he’s strong on the outside but not deep down. I feel like the opposite. I’m always falling apart on the outside, tripping over myself, not knowing what to say.. It’s when I’m alone, breathing in the silence, that I remember that I’m solid at the core.

I’m not really interested in going back to the real sixteen. Sometimes when I substitute teach at high schools I get mistaken for being a student. I’ve been yelled at by French teachers, had to show my id so I could eat off campus, and asked all sorts of weird questions. But what I like about it is that sometimes I get to be around students who have hopes for their lives and big plans for their futures. This I can understand and appreciate even though I know that what is ahead of them isn’t as simple or as easy as they think. Apathy scares me more than anything. But really, where I was wrong at sixteen was that I thought that by this age things would be set. My life would be in order; I’d have it together. Maybe I’m smarter now, maybe less so. All I learned from the lagoon is that as everyone tells me how much I’ve changed I really haven’t changed at all. No matter, if running in Florida is what it took to get me back into volleyball, all the sweat is worth every drop.