“Willfulness must give way to willingness and surrender. Mastery must yield to mystery.”

–Gerald May

I often talk to my clients about the difference between willingness and willfulness. To be willing is to hold out an open hand to reality – ready to accept what comes and to cope with it to the best of one’s ability. Willfulness, to the contrary, is a closed fist – a rejection of reality and an attempt to control and dominate our environment and circumstances.

Being willing does not necessarily mean that we must passively accept what comes. We must be willing to do our part to deal with the circumstances and world that we are confronting rather than wishing for a different world and refusing to cope with what’s before us.

I started this blog to become more willing to share and to become willing to fail at writing and expressing my thoughts, goals, and ambitions.

I believe that travel can be transformative, travel requires surrender and acceptance. It demands that we confront the world as it is and find a way to cope with what comes.

I believe that travel has, for me, been a driving force and ambition. It motivates dreams and keeps me moving towards the life that I want to live and pursuing the values that I hold most dear.

This blog is called Running for Disney because when I began running it was literally to complete a runDisney half marathon that I had impulsively signed up for (despite never having run farther than a 5K and never having actually ENJOYED running). The very goal of traveling to Disney World with a friend to run a race in the early morning dawn pushed me to start training and kept me going through the too many, too long, training runs.

While it is not cool or chic to admit, I love Disney World for the escape it provides from reality acceptance every bit as much as I love it for the chance it offers to be wholly present in the moment on family vacations. In Disney World my family is not focused on the next practice, next school application, next promotion, next transaction – we are free to just be in a place where fun and imagination are the goal.

But Disney World is not my only goal or ambition. My goal with this blog is to share what I’ve learned working as a therapist, as a lawyer, and, more personally, by becoming a mother, wife, and a runner. Being a therapist has made me realize that the things I talk about with clients are often the things I need in my own life and that putting them into practice is EVERY BIT as hard (in fact, harder) as I tell my clients it will be. Writing this blog is an attempt to keep myself focused on accepting my reality and working to cope with it as best as I can, using as many of the skills I have learned through my practice and my life as possible.

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