The McKinley Park Badminton Club operates out of the gym in the McKinley Fieldhouse three days a week, year round. Unlike many Chicago Park District buildings, the gym blessedly includes six window AC units to ensure humane playing conditions throughout the summer months. For the most intense players, however, the draft created by the cooling air has a substantial enough impact on the trajectory of the shuttlecock that they’d rather go without. So we all go without.

For the uninitiated, the heat is overwhelming: even a casual match left my face drained of blood as my body struggled to cool itself; spots dotted my vision and I had to sit down mid-game to avoid fainting.

In the midst of meditating on human frailty with my head between my legs, I had another thought: “Why do people do this to themselves?”

“Do you actually like running?” one of my colleagues asked. I had committed to training for a 10k with two other co-workers and was sharing my training schedule. Weightlifting on Monday/Friday. Speed work on Wednesday. Tempo runs on Monday/Tuesday/Friday. Cross-training on Saturday. Long-runs on Sunday.

I heard my former self saying not too many years ago, “No one actually likes running — they like the effects of running.” But the truth is, I was enjoying it. I loved being outside, the alternating submission of mind to body — body to mind, the acquired intuition of exactly how hard to push to maintain my pace, knowing that at mile six that I could keep going for at least another two. I was breathing better, eating better, sleeping better.

As nice as it sounds, this liberation wasn’t free. Whether from running or from badminton, the elongated second toe on both of my feet took a beating. I guess they call it “runner’s toe.” It’s gross looking: layer upon layer of blood and keratin form a veritable tortoise shell of a barrier between your toe and the world. It’s honestly a bit excessive, but I guess that’s a trauma response for you.

My athletic pursuits this year were a welcome distraction from my job woes. I felt trapped in a dead-end position, starved for human connection, and deeply frustrated by a seemingly endless array of disappointments uniquely distributed to those employed in institutionalized do-gooding.

Having exhausted Janet with my near constant complaining, I decided it was time to give someone else an earful, and committed to pray about it for 40 days. Should I be surprised that the answer I received came from an 87 year old nun?

The morning of the 40th day, I happened to be reading a chapter on “Stability” in The Monastic Heart by Joan Chittister. What was the antidote to the dread I faced each morning logging in to my work email? “Persist and do not grow weary.” Oh boy.

The author, Joan Chittister, is a Benedictine. When you become a Benedictine, you make three life-long vows: stability, fidelity to the monastic way of life, and obedience. The stability part means that you live within the same monastic community for the rest of your life. So I was thrilled to hear someone who hadn’t looked for a job since 1971 say that, “keeping a job isn’t very important in our generation,” that career counselors are providing unsound advice by encouraging job-hopping, and that “the notion of working through an issue … has become foreign to us.”

The defenses came flying in: How out of touch. How privileged.

I still bristle at Chittister’s caricature of contemporary values, but I had to concede her larger point that instability has become such a feature of our lives that we’re almost unconscious of it. I certainly don’t think about my life as being marked by constant upheaval. But even with the tremendously stabilizing privileges of relative wealth and a happy marriage, in my 37 years I’ve lived in 6 states, 2 countries, and 12 homes. I’ve worked for 8 different companies since I graduated from college. In my 9 years with CPS, we’ve had 4 CEOs and my current office has had 3 Chiefs in 2 years … to say nothing of the constant churning in our schools of students, teachers, and principals.

I was familiar with the symptoms:

• Emotional instability … check
• Negativity … check
• Personal inquietude … check
• Perpetual restlessness … check

And I was certain, from my instant defensiveness, that there was something for me here.

“To live a stable life in the monastic spirit is to take responsibility for your world as it is. It is about bringing the peace, spreading the love, and putting your shoulders to the task of steadying life as it is and making life as it should be. What you do to bring calm and care to others will make all the difference to life as you know it.”

The sentiment was almost trite, and yet it shocked me in the moment for how antithetical it was to a career culture driven by individual ambition and obsessed with rapid, perpetual growth. What would become of someone who simply refused to participate in the ceaseless launching of ourselves toward higher and higher positions of incompetence and instead halted their own progression so they could care more earnestly for those around them?

I’m too terrified to try on that idea as a way of moving through the world, but I’m willing to audition for the role of kind and dependable office worker who is patient and generous with everyone and see how far that gets me.

It wasn’t just my work life that was in disarray, but my religious one as well. Over the past seven years I had found stabilizing comfort in the routine liturgy of a Lutheran congregation that meets on Saturday evenings near our home. The transporting smell of incense. The calm of the meditation bell. The mystery of the communion bread and wine. But the longer I stayed, the harder it became to ignore how out of step I felt. Long-time members chuckled at my earnestness. “That’s not really in our community’s spiritual DNA,” they advised. “Have you tried a spiritual director?” they’d suggest.

Certain I could find my way in through the kitchen, I volunteered for communion bread baking responsibilities and was gifted with a recipe that had been passed down in the church for generations. I eyed the recipe with suspicion, but wanting to honor the tradition of the community, I followed it faithfully. The resultant sludge I poured onto the baking sheet could hardly be called a dough. Perhaps whatever mystery consecrates the bread into The Body also first turns this goop into bread? I cut tiny crosses into the “loaves,” said a prayer, and opened the oven. The pastor doesn’t say anything when I hand over my sad, puck-like offerings, but a few weeks later I get an email for “HT Communion Bread Tips.”

I look for other ways to hold on: passing out bulletins, reading scriptures during the service, preparing reception meals, attending monthly compline services. None of these address the ache in my heart. One of our pastors decides on doing house calls as a form of pastoral care. We invite her over for snacks and wine. The next time I see her she calls me by the wrong name.

In October, our bishop publishes a political statement I find troubling. I share my concerns with the pastor. He’s grateful I’ve expressed my concerns, and kindly dismisses them.

I stop our recurring donations. I don’t understand what it would mean for me to “take responsibility for my world as it is,” in this space.

Janet tells me to ask Reddit for advice. I ask Reddit. Why am I asking Reddit? I ask ChatGPT too.

A few weeks later, there’s some good news: I’ve been serving on a committee to call a third pastor for our congregation for over two years, and we’ve finally found the right person. I should feel elated. Instead I’m crushed by some off-handed comment one of my fellow committee members has made about the irrelevance of one of the interview questions I wrote:

In a world where trust in religious institutions has eroded and people are forming spiritually-meaningful, moral, or justice-oriented communities and practices in non-religious contexts, what is the compelling case for the relevance of church generally, and the Lutheran church, in particular?

I stop going to church.

In November, I ignore everything I learned from the nun and apply for a job at my old school. I interview, accept the position, and begin fantasizing about my new life as a math teacher. The details of the position change. My current boss gives a counter offer. I change my mind so many times that Janet cries. I decide not to leave. The next day when I open my laptop I recite my mantra: persist and do not grow weary.

A week later I’m already full of regret.

Why am I doing this to myself?

January passes in a blur of sickness and the unraveling of all of my remaining habits carefully constructed to shield my fragile psyche from confronting my despair.

I stop running, swimming, weightlifting and playing badminton. I start picking at my brutalized toenails. They’re supposed to “fall off,” but I think the doctors who say that are the same ones who tell you that a shot “pinches.” If you bend them back, they kind of peel off in layers.

I tell Janet I’m never doing holiday cards or blog posts again. She holds my hand and tells me this can be the last one.

It’s February and the New Year has come and gone. In another week, Chinese New Year will be over and I will have lost any possible pretense that this is a “New Year” reflection.

The “Honey Do” list by the tea kettle has been water stained and re-written in Janet’s careful handwriting several times over the past three months:

• Invest HSA funds
• Blog post
• Send out holiday cards
• Call grandma

Why am I doing this to myself?

It’s March and now it’s not just the nuns who are after me … it’s the rabbis too. A dear friend from church, worried she hasn’t seen me, reaches out via text and mentions an article by Rabbi Sharon Brous recently published in the New York Times. What’s it called? “Train Yourself to Always Show Up.” Oh boy.

It’s a beautiful article detailing a pilgrimage ritual from the Second Temple period described in the Mishnah. Jews would ascend the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and begin to circle it by turning to the right. However, if you were a mourner or had been ostracized by the community, you would circle in the opposite direction by turning to the left. As the majority looked into the faces of the broken-hearted and ostracized, they would ask, “Why did you turn to the left?” After listening to the response, those who turned to the right would offer their fellow pilgrims a blessing.

It’s a very touching scene, and Rabbi Brous uses the story to draw out timeless life-lessons: the importance of bearing witness to each other’s pain, our tendency to withdraw when we are hurt — and the need to resist that instinct, and the human inclination to allow tribalism to kill our curiosity.

Naturally, the first time I read the article I am flooded with rage. I’m sure everyone who had been shunned by the community was delighted to hear their brethren in good standing offer them a blessing. There’s nothing that feels better than hearing someone who has purposely excluded you from participating in the family tell you they love you. How thoughtful of the institutional religion to expect those they had cast out to continue to show up, be gawked at, and repeatedly respond to the question, “What happened to you?”

I try to force myself to stay open. What if Rabbi Brous is right? Do not take your broken heart and go home. Entrust your pain to the community. Persist and do not grow weary. Put your shoes on and show up at the gym. Play by the community rules — even if it makes you faint.

I shut my computer and reach for my phone to text a response to my friend. I don’t know how to say anything that is in my heart. I put down my phone.

A week later and I’m back to the Mishnah. Middot 2.2. There’s a feisty rabbinic disagreement that was not mentioned in the New York Times article. Rabbi Meir says that the blessing that was given to the ostracized was, “May He who dwells in this house inspire them to draw you near again.” Rabbi Yose is not a fan of this take. He prefers, “May He who dwells in this house inspire you to listen to the words of your colleagues so that they may draw you near again.”

It honestly makes me cry. And then laugh.

I go back and reread the original article with Rabbi Meir’s words in mind. This time I don’t hear a punishing training schedule or a call to show up, regardless of the cost. This time I hear a gentleness: “Step toward those whom you know will hold you tenderly.”

I pick up my phone to text my friend.

The word “endure” comes from the Latin indurae or “harden.” When we train our physical bodies, that hardness is the literal outcome: toenails, calluses, muscles. But I wonder if the endurance of the spirit accomplishes the opposite: honoring those tender places … keeping them soft, recognizing the gifts that can accompany wounds, allowing the accumulating tally of shame, regret, and failure to make us quick to forgive and slow to anger.

Physically training the body is painful — training the spirit even more so. Over time, I’ve grown in my confidence to distinguish between bodily pain that stimulates growth and the pain that disables. I’m afraid I’m far less discerning in the affairs of the soul.

Do you know what really causes runner’s toe? It’s not the commitment to hitting the pavement daily … it’s much more likely to be a poorly fitting shoe. How tragically human that the containers we build around ourselves to provide stability, safety and care are the very structures that also have the capacity to inflict life-long wounds.

For some the most obvious answer is to abolish the institutions themselves. Others might prefer to switch out the “shoe” for a new brand. That’s a blog post for another year. For me today, the antidote to the rigidity of institutions is not their dissolution, but to find the soft places within them where you can rest: the corner of the gym where together we decide we will turn on the AC, the colleague who affirms your efforts on a bad day, a conversation tucked away in a centuries old religious text.

I hope that each of you may find an inner life that is dynamic enough to include both Rabbi Yose and Rabbi Meir. That you can love the body you have and the body you are. That you will find the blessing of a community that holds you with tenderness, the wisdom to perceive when this is no longer the case, and the stability to extend that tenderness to others.

With gratitude to the many that have held me with tenderness this year.

December 2022

Our usage of 2023 is loose. Communication is difficult like that. The highlight of December was our trip to Paris, and our Paris experience was representative of our year. 2023 was a memorable year of appreciating money saving opportunities and not taking good photos.

Paris has so many beautiful places. Yet, going through our photos, we mainly have pictures of Janet looking at food or trying to get the last bits out of food.

Of course, we went to the main touristy areas and took pictures as well. Attempts at capturing a good moon picture led to 14 photos, otherwise identical but for the blur around a bright white dot.

We also went to hole-in-the-wall restaurants to indulge in wine and oysters, where close-up shots brought out the glamor in focal objects.

Lindsay’s favorite food experience was a wine and cheese combo enjoyed in our tiny Airbnb. Getting pastries for takeout from three places and eating them with coffee was a close second.

January 2023

For MLK weekend, we snagged a flight deal and coordinated with Esha and Kelvin for a trip to Kansas City. At the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Lindsay was fascinated by a display of an artist’s daily self-portraits and her account of accomplishments. The artist never noted her portraits as an accomplishment though.

At the smaller Kemper Museum of Contemporary Arts, Janet thought about her job and commiserated with the Crying Giant.

Back at home, we celebrated Lunar New Year x2 with old friends and new.

We also discovered the Maggie Daley Park Ice Skating Ribbon. We bought ice skates and Janet finally learned how to stop, sort of.

February 2023

At the start of February, Janet made a beautiful cake. Only the successes get a picture taken.

After last year’s skiing success, we decided to visit Emily and try a real mountain. Having previously only skied in the Midwest, skiing in Vermont made us feel very inexperienced.

The rest of the month was quiet. Janet started her job search in earnest and committed to developing a few hobbies so she’d stop working so much. Lindsay joined a local orchestra that meets a few blocks away from our condo.

March 2023

The end of winter is a great time to host. We invited our new badminton friends over for a meal.

There was a processing mistake made on our Vermont skiing trip that led to us getting a free weekend at an Epic resort. Since we had limited time to plan, we thought that we might have more fun trying snowboarding at Wilmot, our local Epic resort (hill).

In March, Lindsay also started taking up running outdoors. One of us is better at having hobbies. Janet met Lindsay up for food at the end of her run. We also saw the Chicago River dyed green for St. Patrick’s Day.

April 2023

April was a transition month. The weather isn’t consistent enough to be excited, and Janet started her new job. Lindsay continued to try to fatten everyone up with delicious food. Hanh and Liam hosted us for Easter and gifted us a bird feeder. It was very exciting to see the house finches come by. Also, our orchids bloomed beautifully.

May 2023

In May, the city wakes up from hibernation. We went to museums, movie screenings, arts festivals, basketball games, and volunteered for park district trash pickups.

At the end of the month, we snuck in a short trip to Mexico City, where public transportation was delightful and public restrooms were nowhere to be found. We sampled many local fruits and tacos. As is standard for our trips nowadays, we went to the major tourist attractions to burn off our high calorie intake.

June 2023

Lindsay had been wanting to do an overnight canoe camping trip in Wisconsin for years, and she finally made it happen in June. We went with more capable friends who tried to teach us how to start a fire. There was no picture taken, so you can infer our successfulness. While we were out of the house, we had our interior brick walls tuckpointed. Yay for good planning!

During the rest of June, we watched the Dragon Boat Race at Ping Tom Memorial Park, went to a live storytelling event hosted by The Moth, picnicked at the lawn during Grant Park music concerts, and discovered Trader Joe’s knockoff of Supergoop’s sunscreen. Janet also had to go through a medical procedure and was pronounced healthy. With such a busy month, we had a low-key dinner at home to celebrate our anniversary.

July 2023

Over the July 4 long weekend, we’ve made it a habit to visit Lindsay’s relatives in Ohio. Unfortunately, we did not take any photos. We also went on a cabin trip with our ex-Allstate friends in Two Rivers, WI. The only pictures we have from Two Rivers are of mushrooms…

Janet has many pictures in this month of failed cakes. The only other picture is a selfie taken at a theater showing of Personality: The Lloyd Price Musical.

August 2023

Maryland has firmly made it on our happy-to-revisit list of places. Esha and Kelvin picked us up from the Baltimore airport and drove down to our Southern Maryland vacation spot. We caught crabs, ate crabs, kayaked, canoed, found new mushrooms, and had an unforgettable experience with a pufferfish.

The pufferfish experience requires some storytelling:

Because our main crab pots caught crabs without us needing to actively do much, a few of us (mainly Lindsay) wanted to try their hand at catching crabs in a more primitive manner. While waiting for a crab to come to the bait, a fish swam by. Wanting to show off her abilities, Lindsay tried to close the cage on the fish. The fish should have been small enough to swim through the grates of the cage. But this was a pufferfish that decided to puff itself while going through the grates. The fish got stuck. Lindsay thought she killed the fish and freaked out, dropping the cage to the bottom of the shallow waters where the fish faceplanted and showed a little tail sticking up.

Janet pulled the cage up to look at the fish. While Esha took a picture, the fish moved, scaring all of us. Then ensued Googling for ways to get a pufferfish to de-puff. Janet decided that the pufferfish needed to burp out air, so she kayaked out to tie the cage into a position for the pufferfish to be upright.

About two hours later, the pufferfish de-puffed itself enough to get through the grates and swim away. This happened too fast for us to get a photo though. During the wait, Lindsay discovered that our pufferfish friend is edible and debated whether she wanted to try to cook it. Janet objected based on the effort put in to try to save the fish. Luckily for our puffed-up friend, Lindsay is often very indecisive.

May this experience serve to remind us that we can be our own worst enemy and put ourselves in ridiculously compromising positions.

September 2023

We kicked off September with a camping Meetup over Labor Day weekend. The trip started off horribly with our rental car getting towed from our parking lot while we were loading it up with gear. The rest of the trip was okay. We met some very nice people, saw the Starlink train (Lindsay was very upset), and tried whitewater rafting when the water level was probably too low to do so safely. We’re still figuring out what types of group trips we enjoy.

With Janet switching jobs, vacation days were scarce in 2023, which we tried to stretch out by taking red-eye flights. Our big summertime vacation was to Glacier National Park. Gorgeous place, but so difficult to get to. The badminton junior world championships happened to be playing in Spokane. During our last day of rain, we opportunistically bought tickets and gawked at a few worldclass matches.

As a month of harvest, we enjoyed bitter melon from Karin’s garden and went apple picking with our ex-Allstate peeps.

October 2023

Kelvin visited Chicago in early October, and we took the opportunity to eat a lot of food, which is a little more than normal.

We took a short weekend trip to Atlanta, where Lindsay ate a delicious blackened grouper fish sandwich, and we pretended to be children by joining an aquarium sleepover.

Back in Chicago, it snowed on Halloween.

November 2023

Lindsay and Janet did the Hot Chocolate Run in November. We hit our goal of running 10K under an hour. At the finish line, Janet noticed a photographer and Lindsay did not, resulting in our favorite photo of the year.

Esha and Kelvin visited us in November to prepare for their upcoming move (so excited!). We also visited Lindsay’s Ohio relatives over Thanksgiving. Alas, no pictures were taken from either event. We only have pictures of our pumpkin carvings.

December 2023

December is a busy month with holiday parties and other social gatherings. Despite the challenging logistics, and also because of them, this month always reminds us to feel thankful for the relationships we have.

Lindsay joined Janet for a few days in New York City. While Janet worked, Lindsay took pictures, ate, and walked in order to eat more. Janet was able to join in a few food adventures.

With food pictures, one of us looks good next to food, and one of us makes food look especially good.

On our way back to Chicago, we were greeted by a stunning view of the city.

Between Christmas and the New Year, we went to Costa Rica. For the first half of our trip, we tried kite surfing (hard). For the second half of our trip, we hunted for coconuts (also hard!).

We made it back to Chicago in time for NYE.

Happy New Year!