Hi Sweet People,
I was asked to write you a good luck letter as you near graduation. If I were to write this letter a the beginning of March, I would have included lots of exclamation points. You made it! The world is your oyster! I am so proud of you! School is so hard and you did a tremendous job! While all of this is true, it’s all been complicated in the last few months by this virus. I was listening to a woman yesterday who was talking about how this is truly a great, collective pause. We may not have wished for this pause, but here we are, and in some ways, we have an unprecedented opportunity to breathe, right here. In 2018, I crashed while biking and sustained a gnarly concussion. In the months that followed, I felt primarily miserable, amid brief feelings of healing, content, joy, and growth. At the time, I would never have wished that sort of injury on anyone, there were days when the only thing I could do was rake leaves, not even put them in bags, just rake them into piles. However, a year later, I started feeling incredibly thankful for the experience. I started saying it was absolutely net-positive. Prior to this concussion, my frenetic, planner-oriented days had left so little space for stillness. Even though I was concussed, I started to feel these deeper parts of who I am bubbling up. I had to start listening to myself, instead of tuning out and focusing on what was happening around me, reacting to the stress of school or what other people wanted from me. Most directly, if I didn’t listen to what my body was telling me, I would end up in a situation where I was far from home and usually with a headache that would put me to bed before the sun set. I learned to listen to the tiny clues, the slight dizziness, or a tiny tinge of pain in my neck in order to keep myself safe and healing instead of taking steps backward and feeling bad for the following days. This listening to my physical body resulted in learning how to listen to my mind as well. I started to understand what intuition was, I felt the nudging thoughts that I’d always had but never addressed. The stillness forced me to turn in. It was incredibly challenging to set a timeline, plan, or even expect anything. I quickly learned that the three-week recovery timeline I’d been given by my doctor was wildly inaccurate. As the months rolled on and I still didn’t heal, I had no choice but to release all expectations. I couldn’t possibly plan for next month, all I could do was listen to what I needed in this moment. I understand there are countless differences between a concussion and a global pandemic, but I find myself being dropped back into the concussion time as I navigate the last few weeks. Here are some of the things I learned after living through a bizarre break from the world and then slowly coming back: -You are here, how incredible is that? You are breathing and your body is working so hard to take care of you. Perhaps now is a great time to say thank you to your body and to look, listen, smell, and feel what’s happening around you. -Planning is important, but having a plan means nothing. It’s super important to go through the process of planning if that feels good, but once you have that plan, it means nearly nothing. We have very little control over what is happening around us and therefore that plan may pan out, but it very well may not. (In the last two years, I’ve planned two trips to bikepack in Europe, the first one was canceled after I already had plane tickets when my best friend fell off a cliff and shattered her foot, this year, we replanned the trip, bought tickets again, and here we are in the middle of a pandemic, with yet another trip canceled) So! Planning is good and exciting and can offer some direction, but the plans can be swept away with the breeze. -Be gentle with yourself. You are trying so hard and you are doing everything you can at this time. All of the things you do are strategies to keep you alive. If you lean on exercise, food, Netflix, relationships, or grades, each of these are part of a strategy you’ve brilliantly developed to keep yourself afloat, functioning, and safe. Even anxiety or depression are strategies our body had developed to keep us safe. For example, if the world is too scary, our body may turn to depression in order to numb out the scariness. If we’ve been taught to seek validation, perhaps a relationship or grades have kept us afloat and mirrored back to us what we want to see in ourselves. All of this points to the notion that we are not actually any of these things. None of us are depression or are our grades. We are not other people’s expectations of us. It is not our job to live up to the expectations other people have of us. At our core, we are good. Each of us is so so good, whole, and beautiful. Regardless of which strategies we have leaned on or learned to hold tight to, they do not define us and they are not who we are. You can be gentle with yourself, it’s not easy, but it can feel good to offer ourselves some grace, some space, and some curiousness about who we are without these strategies we’ve developed. Remember that this lightness is already inside you, you already have happiness inside you, you have peace inside you as well -- you do not have to go looking for these things, they are already there within you. -After everything, remember you have permission to begin again. Whether this resonates for your day, for just a moment, or for the last years, you are growing and learning and expanding. This means the old shell you lived in may or may not serve you anymore. You can change and you are not stuck in what you can do based on what you did yesterday. -You don’t have to make sense of anything today. You don’t need to solve any problems, you don’t need to feel okay, you don’t need to follow any script. There is no right way to feel, so, as the confusion of graduation, online school, uncertainty, families, health, fear, needs, and aspirations all squiggle together into a blur of color, you are allowed to sit and breathe, or eat ice cream, or cry, or sleep. Whatever it is that you need right now, feel it, and take note that it is happening. Realizing what you’re doing and perhaps being curious as to why can allow us to grow. However, there are really no rules and you do not have to do anything at this time. This comes back to being gentle with yourself. This is confusing! And hard! And disorienting! No one is solving it today and you can’t figure out your life, or maybe even next week, at this time. This is okay though, if you can embrace the groundlessness, we are all floating above where we perhaps felt grounded just a little while ago. Maybe this space is just what we needed to know where we want to land next time. While all of this may feel isolating or scary, the irony is we are all experiencing waves of similar moments. Your experience is your own, but it is also shared. I can’t imagine the uncertainty you may be feeling, graduating into a world so greatly limited by a virus. I too, feel scared and uncertain. I also know that things are changing all the time and they will shift back and forth. Things will get better, they will also get worse, but they will get better. If any of you would like to chat, I am here. Oh! Also! When I started this letter, I intended to tell you all that teaching recitation was, without a doubt, the most important thing I did at CU. Each of you holds such a big piece of my heart. That semester, I cared so much about supporting you and doing what I could on the day to bring a sense of calmness and love into your days. Since teaching recitation, I’ve settled into the idea that I want to teach at a university. So, while this is a good luck, and a please take deep breaths note, I also want to say thank you for fueling me with hope, excitement, and some guidance. Sending lots of love. -Emily
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We may not be able to ride together right now, but the BNG Squad is still training hard and preparing for whatever races or events might happen this year. It’s true, our training rides have turned more toward adventure rides, but the intention is still the same: work hard, push the boundaries, and be ready to pin that number on whenever it might happen.
Each of us has been taking COVID-19 seriously and we’ve been following the strict solo or household-only riding recommendations. As I’m sure you all know, training like this can be lonely and a bit monotonous. Without friends to share our epic rides or witness our moments of total meltdown mid-bonk, the motivation to keep riding can be hard to find sometimes. To help each other find new inspiration and motivation to get out the door each week, we’ve been creating challenges for each other. Dani started out with an epic ride challenge through Estes Park one week. Emily followed up by tasking us with searching out the craziest animals we could find the next week. It’s been fun and has helped us expand outside of our normal riding patterns. And now we want all of you to play along! Welcome to the #BNGQuestThe #BNGQuest – a weekly adventure near home that we hope will expand your regular riding routes and give you a little purpose for kitting up when you need the extra motivation. Here’s how it works: Each Thursday, we’ll post the weekend ride quest on Instagram. To start things out, we’re charging you to find a cool mural around town during your ride. Take a picture of the mural with your bike in it and post it up on IG – posts or stories work great. Add a few tags (more info below) and we’ll pick a winner each Monday and send out some sweet BNG prizes. Fun and easy! That’s what it’s supposed to be, so get out and start planning some new routes, check out some different roads, and slow things down for just a minute to share your adventures with all of us. While we can’t all ride together right now, we can still have some fun together. So, let’s venture out on some BNG Quests and keep the fun alive. To win some prizes, be sure to tag three things: 1 - #BNGQuest 2 - Tag our sponsor of the week – we’ll post this info with our Thursday ride quest post. So be sure to tune in for the week’s prize and sponsor tag. 3 - Tag one of us so we can share your sweet photos with the world: @dani_marie @emily.schaldach @kplegan Good luck! Have fun! We’ll see you out there in spirit! |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
September 2022
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