hurdles

I love the feeling of successfully jumping one of life's hurdles.
there is little out there that's better than that feeling of mastery, of success, of triumph.
and I can get it from the silliest of little things.

last evening I learned to do something new, and I won't go into it other than to say it's something that I'd never done before, that I thought could be painful, and that I wasn't sure at all about doing all by myself. but I did it, I did it well enough that the end result was acceptable, and I survived the whole experience.
and at the end, I have this increased sense of pride in myself, and a heightened belief that I can do more things than I often give myself credit for.

it's up there with plumbing tricks: fixing my leaking bathroom sink, and replacing guts of my toilet.
it's there with learning to care for and clean my bike, even those tricky little spots where gears and chains and cables perform functions I don't really understand.
it's there with hanging my own Christmas lights and replacing sprinkler heads and cleaning gutters and interpreting instruction manuals and directions for installing whatever needs to be installed.

the other day I was with a friend who was describing a bike ride. he told me that the ride started off with a climb, and looked at the (none-too-slight) hill in front of us and said, it's like that. no warm up, you just start climbing something as steep as that.
I looked at the hill, trying to gauge its severity and grade, and then replied, that's okay. I can do anything.

which is the gift I've received from these past few years of no longer being married, and of becoming a cyclist. all of my possibilities have been pulled from within me, tested, stretched, and yanked, screaming and clawing at times. the princess in the ivory tower was forced to become a chambermaid, and while doing so discovered that she was pretty darn good at being a maid. she might miss aspects of that tower, but all in all, she is a deeper, richer, fuller human being for giving it up.

I can do anything.

and that's a comforting, vitalizing, powerful feeling.