I’ve always been fond of saying “I’m not an athlete. I’m an activist who simply chooses something athletic as part of how I choose to make a difference in the world.”
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I am an athlete. I’m not sure there’s really one way to define what it means to be athletic, but having just returned home from my 25th Anniversary Tenderness Tour after 13 days traveling the hiking and biking trails of Northern Indiana I find myself a lot more willing to give myself credit for pushing beyond the realm of reason.
Long after an age when many professional athletes have retired and are sitting themselves in the announcer’s booth, I still find a reason at least once a year to drag my butt out on the road trying to make a difference in the world in ways that are big and small.
This essay isn’t about the Tenderness Tour. This essay isn’t about making a difference in the world. This essay is about what it means to slow down enough that one can experience the richness of life in all its glory and wonder and sorrow and pain and everything else there is to experience.
I suppose I’ve never considered myself an athlete because I’ve never really been able to wheel myself quickly. If you’ve ever participated in a 5k, 10k, or a mini-marathon or anything like that, then you’ve likely seen wheelchair athletes with their souped up chairs starting at the front of the pack.
I’m not one of them.
I don’t have a souped up chair. I have an ordinary, everyday wheelchair that really isn’t made for traveling the roads of Indiana or anywhere else for that matter. Before I ended up in a wheelchair 20+ years after living with spina bifida, I recorded the official slowest time ever recorded for the 500 Festival Mini-Marathon. It’s no coincidence that the very next year the event had a time limit.
I guess that means I’m a history maker in all the wrong ways.
I’ve never wheeled the 500 Festival Mini-Marathon precisely because I’m pretty sure I still couldn’t make their time limit even now that I’m on wheels.
I’m not fast. I’m not the best. I don’t win races and I don’t set records. I’d have never qualified for the Paralympics.
You see, I like life at 3-4 miles per hour.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy being impressive. It’s occasionally nice to show off or have someone be impressed by my wheeling and my physical endurance, but I’m at my happiest when I’m wheeling the hiking trails, the biking trails, the county roads, and the side roads at 3-4 miles per hour.
I love moving forward, but I love moving forward at a pace that allows me to commune with people and nature and my physical being. I love being able to look, really look, at everything around me and I love being able to listen to the sounds of the world and immerse myself in the scents of the universal aura.
I am at my happiest and I am at my most peaceful when I live my life at 3-4 miles per hour.
I am at my best as a human being when I focus less on the doing and more on the actual being.
I returned from this 25th Anniversary Tenderness Tour a changed human being. While this isn’t exactly unusual given my fondness for life on the road, this year was different and it was truly life altering.
This year, I returned from the Tenderness Tour feeling much like I did after that very first tour in 1989 and determined that my life had gotten too busy and too structured and too distracting from that which I’m supposed to be living out.
I came home realizing that every fiber of my being needed to live life at 3-4 miles per hour. I came home realizing that I had bought into the concept of upward mobility, status, structures, money, and distraction.
I came home realizing that in my effort to prove my independence and my ability, I had instead created an isolated and inauthentic world.
I came home realizing that in my effort to prove myself able and worthy, I had immersed myself in activities and relationships that weren’t feeding my soul and were in many ways abusing it.
I came home realizing that my life had drifted away from the things that mean the most to me and drifted toward distractions and disconnections and distance.
There’s something about the Tenderness Tour that, for me, represents everything that I want my life to be. I think the problem is that once I return from life on the road, from life at 3-4 miles per hour, that I return to a world where it seems like everything is designed to speed things up. In 2013, when I toured in Southern Illinois, I caught a glimpse of what life might be like if my circle of life or support circle or friends or whatever you want to call it, knew everything about me and not only loved me anyway but enfolded me into their nest.
Because, I’ve come to believe that we all need a nest and that need never goes away.
This year, when I began planning for a 13-day, nearly 200-mile trip across Northern Indiana, I also began envisioning a circle of life, a Tenderness Team, that would represent both the practical/logistical needs of life and the road but also a nesting of sorts into a mutually responsive circle that was safe, nurturing, caring, and celebrating.
For the most part, I succeeded and to feel this while living at 3-4 miles is both awe-inspiring and a little bit frightening. At 3-4 miles per hour, you are truly with another human being in a way that is honest and vulnerable and innocent and freeing.
The weird thing to me was that as I began constructing this year’s team, I found myself surprised by those who were attracted to the idea and surprised by those who were not. I was, in fact, awed by some of those who embraced the Tenderness Tour in ways I’d never before experienced and, as well, I found myself saddened by those who pulled away.
I suppose I didn’t live into quite as fully as I’d originally planned. In 2013, I was surrounded by nurses and CNA’s who practically demanded to know the details of my disability and knew when I was shamefully hiding. This year, I sort of hemmed and hawed my way around delicate subjects and, for the most part, took baby steps toward self-revelation and authenticity.
But, I was there and they were there and that is life at 3-4 miles per hour.
At 3-4 miles per hour, we talked. We listened. We sat. We got lost. We got found. We made a difference in ways big and small. We got where we were going, but didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about how or when.
We experienced each other’s strengths and weaknesses and, at least I believe, realized that everything that goes into comprising who we are is pretty damn cool.
Even though I may not have lived into that comfort of self-revelation, at 3-4 miles you learn things about me that my ordinarily busy world allows me to hide behind masks. You learn my social insecurities and my physical quirks. You learn how my disability impacts my daily life and, at least on some level, you learn how I try to cope with that in ways that are healthy and could use some changing.
It was weird to have a disability be on display yet to not be disabled by it.
I came home realizing that, much like I felt after that first Tenderness Tour, my life needed to change. I need to live my life at 3-4 miles per hour and I need people like these in my life, not so much because of function, but because they are just this source of endless joy and love and acceptance and my being able to live into who I really am.
I came home realizing that the activities and people and structures and organizations that don’t support my life at 3-4 miles per hour need to go and, in fact, I’ve already started acting on this realization in ways big and small. It’s not easy. In fact, in some ways it’s remarkably complicated yet it is absolutely necessary.
I began to realize that this Tenderness Tour I’ve been doing for 25 years isn’t just about activism or breaking cycles or raising money, but it’s about creating a nesting collective of some of the kindest, most creative, funniest, and most extraordinary people I’ve ever met and actually figuring out how to fully live into that with authenticity and honesty and commitment.
So, here I am. I’m back. Yet, I’m really back. Oh sure, I came back and rested a day then went right back to work. It was different and it was slower and it was more intentioned. I came back realizing, sometimes painfully, those areas of my life that needed to be set aside and those areas of my life that could simply be gently slowed down. I came back realizing those relationships that were healthy and those relationships that were unhealthy. I came home realizing that life, regardless of one’s circumstances or job or family demands or stressors, truly can be lived at 3-4 miles per hour.
And so it begins…
