And somewhat because of this feeling that I've lost something in my life I've decided not to go to Nationals. I realized that I've been feeling pressured to get busy training for it and not liking the feeling. It doesn't feel like fun. I spend 40 hours a week working plus the time I have to spend cleaning the house, shopping for groceries, cooking meals, doing laundry, etc and then on top of that I'm supposed to find time to train and teach.
A friend has invited me to spend a few days at her in-laws' lake house in western MD in August. It sounds like paradise. It's a very underdeveloped area, just farmland and woods and this long, long lake. There'll be no one there but us and our dogs. We can swim--or not, paddle the canoe--or not, lay in the hammock and snooze, read, whatever. I was going to have to refuse because I don't have enough vacation days to do that and go to Nationals. And then I started thinking about the pressure I've been feeling to train, the realization that I'll probably not make it past the 1/4 finals and the difficulty I'll probably have finding the vacation time to go to the Nationals and to my nephew's wedding right afterward. So I decided to accept my friend's invitation and skip the Nationals.
It's very likely that next year the Nationals will be in the Southeast anyway, possibly even in NC. Jaime will only be a year older and Devon will probably be ready to compete by then. It'll be much cheaper, much easier to get there and I won't have to fly Jaime. It just makes so much more sense to wait a year.
I guess going to the two Regionals and seeing what the competition is going to be like also made me realize that I'll never be really competitive. It seems like you have to be willing to really dedicate yourself to doing little else (at least if you work).
And seeing the people I saw last week and enjoying hanging out with them also made me realize how I can never spare the vacation time to visit them anymore. Every single day of annual leave that I have is used for agility (except at Christmas) so I've been unable to even think about going back to Greece or taking a trip somewhere else.
It's funny how you can tell yourself that you have a particular goal and then find out it's not something you ever really believed. I've always thought that when I get to the end of my life I want to be able to look back on it and feel that it meant something. And I don't see how chasing something as fleeting as first place in a competition will ever be really meaningful to me for more than a few days or weeks.
But my relationships with my family and friends, my connection with the natural world and my dogs has lasting value for me and I've really cut myself off from thinking about that. I've always used my time in the woods and on the water to reflect on things and figure out what is meaningful to me but I've been too busy with agility to do that for the last few years.
I think it started as a way to distract myself from all the pain and misery of Valli's sickness and death and then as a distraction when Ted got sick and then died followed 4 days later by Simon's death followed by a year of having to deal with Honey's dementia and death. Jeez, no wonder I needed a distraction. It's a wonder that I got through all that with any sanity left. And it's amazing that I can still enjoy life knowing all that I know about death. Or maybe it's *because* of everything that's happened that I can still enjoy life. George's death must have reached me more than I realized. It must be what's gotten me thinking along these lines again.
After Valli died and I got through the first year of grieving and started to be able to enjoy things again, I thought I'd never lose that feeling of being able to get so much out of life and to be able to ignore all the little things that can bring me down sometimes. But then all the other crap started happening and I started feeling like I was sinking again. Since then I think I've kind of just been too busy distracting myself to realize I was losing a lot of the stuff that had made me happy before.
For a lot of people winter is the season of retrospection but for me it's always been summertime. I guess because it's when I'm the least busy with other things like agility. Yesterday I took the dogs to Duke Forest and walked to the river. It wasn't exactly peaceful because Devon kept attempting to fling himself into the flood waters and Jaime kept shoving the bumper into my hands so I'd throw it for him but it reminded me of all the times I had done this same walk with Haven and Simon. I must have done that walk with them at least 50 times not counting all the others we used to do and I realized that Devon has never been there once. What happened to all that time I used to have? Why don't I do that anymore? Is it really just because of agilty or is it something else?
I think I need to give myself more time. I need to get reacquainted with my own thoughts and ideas. Maybe I need to stop doing agility for awhile. I don't know but I think I'll just give myself permission to do only what I really want to do for awhile.