A LETTER FROM CHRIS SUAREZ
LOOK AT THE STARS
I know. It’s hard not to hear or read those four words and not think of the uber-popular Coldplay song. But this is exactly what I did earlier this week. I woke up at around 2am on Wednesday. I felt anxious. I felt unsettled. I felt nervous. I felt like something was off. I was suddenly no longer tired, so I got up, grabbed a sweatshirt, walked down the hallway, and walked out the front door of my house. I have a couple chairs out on the front patio that my kids and I use for stargazing. The sky was clear and I immediately saw thousands of stars scattered across the black sky. Instantly I felt a little less anxious, less unsettled, and less nervous.
I have found this exercise helpful on the rare occasions that I feel my stress levels elevate. It allows me to feel very small in that moment. Surrounded by what is a limitless and unfathomable universe, we are all pretty small. In those moments, any challenge that I’m working through, or any problem I am struggling with, seems pretty insignificant. It’s a reminder of how small I am, and a reminder of how meaningless most of what we do day in and day out really is. Being a small part of a large community has always been calming to me. It eliminates my personal importance, while confirming that I do still have purpose and still play a part in something bigger.
As I began to feel a bit more calm, I reflected on what caused the uneasy feeling I had awoken with. I pinpointed that my anxiousness was stemming from the upcoming marathon I was planning on running this Sunday in Chicago. Unpacking emotions and feelings has always been a strategy I’ve used to control them or eliminate them when needed. Recently I came across some research that proved in hundreds of fMRI’s how even just labeling your feelings in an auditory way causes our prefrontal cortex to kick in and calms our limbic system down. It allows us to stop, identify the emotion we are experiencing, and allow our logical brain to manage it. Interestingly I realized I was feeling the same anxiousness or energy that I had felt before my last marathon - my somewhat comical disaster of the 2022 New York City. The thought of repeating that seemed to create unnecessary stress. I was visualizing a repeat performance. I identified the nervousness as unhealthy. It wasn’t contributory to a positive result. It wasn't the emotion or feeling I wanted to attach to the race. It certainly didn’t need to wake me up at 2am on Wednesday.
These feelings can often stem from wanting to meet expectations. I don’t live with a lot of external expectations currently. I don’t find myself trying to meet others' expectations of me. None of my friends are expecting me to run a certain pace or time or even care if I finish. These are all personal expectations I have for myself. Some healthy. Some unhealthy. And we all have them. So whether we allow others' expectations of us to affect our emotions and feelings, or we allow our own to do the same job, this was a needed reminder.
Something I chose as a personal goal - a goal to both challenge myself and to create fun in my life - should definitely not be allowed to take over my feelings.
So just two simple reminders I write to myself before I go to bed on the night before the Chicago Marathon:
There are zero expectations from myself or anyone else other than to go hit a goal and have some fun. I can do both of those things.
The universe is a lot bigger than me running a few miles tomorrow morning. Look up at the stars tonight for some perspective.
Chris Suarez