How is life a shaped? By parentage, siblings, calss and religion, by schooling, vocational choices, by friends, partnerships, children, by place and time, by illness and accident, and sometimes, but most rarely, by surprising choice.

We are the sum of our actions, and of our inactions, yes, that is easy enough to understand. What comes harder is finding ourselves the sum of our emotions, which flicker, altered by experience, by the things we cannot bear to tell ourselves, by the trouble we accrue, the flattening and tamping down as we learn how not to be hurt. As we learn protection and the easiest means of protection.

Surprising choice proves hardest to come by. Most choices, even the disastrous ones, are predictable.

When I am running I inhabit and exit my body in the same moment. I bear witness to the harshest of physical sensations, even while I feel myself flying free and away. I do not want to remember what has happened to me. I do not want to reflect on the past. I can't in a way. I'm not made for regrets.

Under every layer of pain, another layer of recovery lies in wait, the sweet, forever surprising truth of endurance.