I like to run with mosquitoes.
Don’t misunderstand me. I hate mosquitoes. In Canada we have a lot of mosquitoes, but if you want to be outside, you have to deal with them.
If you haven’t met a mosquito, they are tiny little flying vampires that suck your blood and sound like a buzzing F16. No, they don’t have hockey sticks. And no, they don’t live in igloos.
Mosquitoes are Canada’s unpaid air force.
My mosquitoes keep me motivated to run just a little faster. Otherwise they buzz and then they strike. They motivate me to keep going when I am tired.
Mosquitoes land, take hold and strike us where we are we don’t expect. We can keep busy swatting them away, get angry, or we can move.
Have you let your mosquitoes keep you in and keep you down?
We all face mosquitoes, even if we live in a part of the world that is mosquito free. You and I have to evade personal, internal mosquitoes every day: Nagging doubts about our ability to write, lack of confidence in our leadership skills, questioning whether we can make it as an entrepreneur or artist, comparing ourselves with other professionals, being ungrateful or complaining.
We all face doubts, confidence busters, questions, comparisons and negativity. We have a choice about how we respond:
- Stay inside and avoid them
- Spend your time swatting them away, be preoccupied with them and let them become your focus
- Get angry or depressed. Eat, drink and be merry…
- Move: keep them guessing, make them work for it, become a hard target
Don’t make the mistake of getting down on yourself if you realize that you spend most of your time avoiding, preoccupied or angry. We can all do that from time to time. But you can bring it back. You can choose, today, to move.
Moving can mean a lot of things. For some it means running. It can mean doing art even when we are not sure what to do. It means taking business classes even when our ideas are unclear. It means counting our strengths rather than our strikes and then taking the next step. It means that we keep going.
Today, I ran past my mosquitoes. It was great. How about you?
Keep it real
Getting High on Recovery 