Embracing My Weakness

It's been all quiet on the Midwestern blog lately. School's back in session for me, and after slacking off a bit, I've finally buckled down. My week in review became a fortnight and then some. Tomorrow I run my first half marathon of the season. Our church's women's retreat is next weekend, which I coordinate, so I've got a big weekend/week ahead of me. Life's gotten busy again. Yesterday, though, we had a snow day.

Big snow. Little dogs.

This past week I learned a bit about myself I thought I'd share. I'm taking two math classes this semester, linear algebra and calculus. One class had been getting a higher billing than the other since the start. Calculus. It just flows with my brain. (Nerdiness previously established) Linear algebra was getting the back seat. In my search for why I realized that I prefer to do math with letters rather than numbers. I'm a terrible number cruncher. When I took trigonometry a few years ago, I had two errors going into the final. One was a copying error, and one was an addition number. Data entry has always been slow going for me. This week I noticed I was favoring my strengths.

When my daughter practices piano I tell her often (borderline nag) to practice the measures she doesn't know as well so that those sections can catch up to the measures she know well. I remind her that if she plays the whole thing over and over again without practicing the weak parts independently the piece will remain unbalanced. Strong parts will become stronger, and the weak parts won't catch up.

This week I took my own advice. I hunkered down and did some number crunching. Lots and lots of number crunching. I'm not much faster, or better at data entry, but I'm more comfortable and confident with the material. Much more balanced.

I am also trying to do this with my fitness. I love running. Love. Love. Love running. However, I can't do more than three real push ups. I'm unbalanced. When I look at my mileage for January, it's lower than I'd like, but it doesn't show my cross training. Yoga, weights, swimming and even resting. And now shoveling and snow shoeing. There have been several days this year that lifting my arms was a bit rough.Striving for balance. Embracing my weakness.

Snowshoeing with the girlios