You know this time we live in is a funny one isn't it. We have the internet and social media and most of us know way more wonderful people than we actually have time for. We have contact with more beautiful people that we can actually know. I'm talking about the real kind of knowing here, the kind where you know what's breaking their soul and what's saving them right now. The kind where you know where they are finding abundance and if they are feeling beloved or broken.

And I can't stop thinking about this of late. It may be because I find, (a change from the twenties to the thirties) is it so often seems all one or the other. On one hand, we see so many hard things are happening. People have struggles, fiscal, relational, with health and the stakes are high. On the other, we can sometimes only see someone who knows all the right answers and does all the right things, has healthy kids and lots of help.

We can forget, with our vision filtered through casual encounters, through instagram and through those sometimes irritating facebook updates and comments. We can forget that everyone goes through hard things. We can forget that no one has their shit together. We can forget that everyone has good too, mixed with their hard.

Even here where I try to keep things balanced I wrote about rocking my baby under the stars but I didn't write about holding her down for a medical procedure while she screamed for help at such intensity that she popped blood vessels in her eyes and all over her face. Some things are just too hard, too raw, too painful that they don't belong to anyone other than me and maybe my most beloved, at least right away.

In the same way that some things are too good, too cherished, too abundant for words. I have yet to write about fifteen years of marriage and as my kids get older I hold most of their stories for just between us.

We can lose our places to be real, because part of our life is too out there and not meant to be shared that way. We can lose our places to be whole, because so much of what we see is just a piece of a whole.

We can forget that crucial piece to wholeness. We need to love each other well and we need to be loved well. We need love to get through the hard and to celebrate the joy.

It's through this love we can know others and be known. It's through love that some sense of wholeness starts to shift into place.

So I wrote myself a reminder. Life is hard and abundant. We have broken parts yet we are beloved. We need to love and we need to let ourselves be loved.

Sometimes you start writing not sure where you are heading, but you just need to put out there. That you are picking up laundry and emptying the never ending dishwasher loads and taking kids to the dentist. And how that is fine, it really is. But also how in December, when it is dark both when you wake up and when you exit the grocery store at 4:15, and when there are five totally overcast days to every one kind of sunny one, that it also isn't. It just isn't totally fine. And one of the kids is sick again, in our family where we hardly get sick, but this fall has been one sickness after another. Now I am my 87 year old grandmother because I am less than one paragraph in and writing about how sick someone is. I'm feeling tired at the thought of three more meals to be made and fed and cleaned up tomorrow and at how I will most certainly be up multiple times with someone who is sick tonight. And how it is too cold to swing outside and look at the stars with anyone who might wake up. Life in the 30's has been described by Madeleine L'Engle as 'the tired thirties' an idea which has much been explored and agreed with by following writers. To me, yes, I see it, I see the tired, I feel the tired. Us mom's with several small children, we all do I think, no matter how we balance this mothering gig with everything else we need to do. But I also feel there is something more, something lurking in these mid thirties, that could shadow slowly like octopus ink.

It can start with the daily monotony, with your own shortcomings, as another day passes with too much TV and too much bickering. Too much caffeine and too little sleep. Too much to do and too little time to do it. Too much work, too little results.

But that isn't where it really blots out the light.

It blots in the friend having a double mastectomy and chemotherapy with two little girls at home. In the news of another family who lost their own little love, gone way too soon. In the poverty and the mental health issues and in the babies who have no one who makes them their priority and in the excess. I could go on.

Because this is where the thirties trump the twenties every time. The world is wider and our worlds are more vulnerable and we just see more bad things happening.

The thirties can threaten to be a godless dark pit.

So I call my husband to say I have to do this, then I text a friend to come with me, or I don't. But either way I grab my running shoes and head to the track. Thank you sweet baby Jesus for the indoor track, because we have a lot of snow, and it gets dark early and it is very cold outside. And thank you for kindred spirits who like to run too. The talking about not much but anything you want, is one of the best kind of freedom. My feet take me around the track over and over, and I'm not a marathoner, I still can't run too far or too fast but with each step I feel lighter. So I do it again the next night. Because right now, this is what is saving me.