Feeling weightless

I had the best dream the other day. Sorry if you hate it when people talk about their dreams -- sometimes I zone off, too. But this one was cool. I ran a half marathon (13.1 miles) with my husband, which is hilarious because he hates running and still grumbles about the time I signed him up for a 10K race (6.2 miles). It was in New Orleans and there was beer and jumbalaya at the end, but still. In my dream, we ran this race fast and it felt so easy, I was going to continue on and run the full 26.2 miles for a marathon. In reality, I try to really race half marathons and I'm usually just dead at the end of them.

Not the first time I've had running or race dreams, but this one I couldn't shake because of how happy I was just thinking about. Over dinner with girlfriends the next day I told them about the dream and it dawned on me why I couldn't forget about this seemingly ho-hum dream. It's because things felt easy. I was free of earthly burdens, you know? And it made me think of being weightless -- a metaphor for feeling great and light and free and happy.

No one can be totally weightless -- we all have stuff to worry about and be responsible for, like spouses, kids, mortgages or paying rent, student loans, whatever. But I realized that up until I figured out last summer that my job was probably going to get whacked, I'd been fortunate enough to have been kind of floating along weightlessly. I ran a ton of races last year and saw the little toddler man turn 1; life with the hub and the teenager was pretty good, and I got pregnant with baby girl. Stuff was good.

I haven't felt weightless for awhile, especially with my layoff nearly 3 months ago, but the dream doesn't make me feel sad about that. Instead, it was a really nice reminder that those weightless times will come and go, but they do come back. So I continue to grow physically larger, I've pinched some kind of nerve in my back, at least one member of my family has been sick as a dog since the new year began, and damned if I'm not sitting in a job search tundra as frigid as January in Chicago. But January will go away and someday I will (hopefully) leave Midwest winters for good, I won't be pregnant forever and someday someone is going to say, my god, we have to hire that woman, she's awesome! And, I'll run some races in 2011 and remind myself to think "weightless" and see how that goes, too. 

Already have my eye on a little race in April. :-)