I start things a lot and don’t finish them. Right now I have a tiling project, three sewing projects, a guitar, a painting project and about a million stories and poems and essays lying around, waiting to be finished. My room is disorganized even though I like to believe that one day I’ll learn to put everything away after I use it.

I keep showing up to run. Consistently. Even when I don’t feel like it, even when I’m really tired or feeling sick, I show up to run. And I enjoy it, no matter how much of the course I have to walk, I love every second of it.

I realized this: I don’t care how I perform when I run, I just go and enjoy the moment of it. With running, I have no expectations. But with everything else that I do—teaching or writing or even the things I do for pure fun, like dancing—I constantly judge where I am with it and apply such a force of pressure to succeed that I’m surprised that I haven’t suffocated yet.