Ammi Midstokke: When endurance is most valuable

All my friends are drinking, shopping and running too much. Some of them are meditating too much. Others are dating, reading, sleeping too much. I hear that half the population is resting better somehow, but I have yet to feel their calm presence penetrate the ennui that has descended upon many in my world.

I am also drinking, shopping and running too much. Which is to say, I drank two entire cocktails one night, got a little reckless in a spring sale, and ran to – then well beyond – the endorphins I seem to perpetually chase in one way or another. Worst of all, running seems to be losing its super power. So are cashmere sweaters. Mostly, I’m sick of winter and headlines.

I don’t know when I was given the impression that snow ought to stop snowing by now, but my shock and disappointment this weekend at the heavy matter falling from the sky indicate I am meteorologically misinformed. I stood at the window in my full running regalia, looking like a marathon-marcher heading to battle, swearing under my breath.

“You’re training for a race. Go run,” my teenager said. This was particularly encouraging because it was chirped approximately four seconds after he bragged about sleeping 16 straight hours and being famished, presumably from all the dreaming and pillow adjusting.

“What are you going to do today?” I asked, bitter about my running obligations.

“I just told you. Eat.”

It’s good to see the youth of the nation are equally struggling to reconcile their reality and using the same coping strategies of sleep and carbs, only with more tattoos and fresher vocabulary.

When delaying an outdoor expedition, it is best to delay it until the weather reaches peak misery-inducing levels. On this day, it was ice-raining or snow-slushing from the top and sideways. Nature gets creative with its precipitation this time of year. These are the days when the best part of going outside is getting back inside. That’s what I tell myself because the only alternative is the possibility that I am getting soft. I think I’m just losing my emotional stamina. I am not alone.

Maybe these final days of winter, the intermittent battering of sharp, cold rain and the grayscale skies that press themselves between the trees, suffocating the tips of larches and defiant ponderosas are reminisce of the relentless bludgeoning of bad news. The methods of emotional triage many of us turn to, such as nature and community, are also under attack.

Meanwhile, the language we use to describe our experiences is being eradicated. In states like Minnesota, new terms like “Trump Derangement Syndrome” are being brought to legislation to support a diagnosis for those struggling with such policies. Perhaps treatment of this new condition will at least be covered by the VA. Maybe new state hospitals will open to house the deranged along with those female-assigned-at-birth suffering from PMS, and BIPOC peoples fantasizing about radical ideas like equality.

If anyone else is feeling the heavy hopelessness of staring into the previously, if not naively, unfathomable changes happening around us, you can trust that you are not deranged. Grieving, shocked, disappointed, angry, scared perhaps, but those are all reasonable emotional responses to such upheaval.

It strikes me that it is not stamina we need now, but endurance. This, we have.

For more than a decade I have written here on the merits of going outside and laughing with friends as the antidote to malaise of any sort. But our rivers are being poisoned, our forests sold, our friends deported and linguistically erased. No amount of running in circles can resolve that, regardless of the weather. Yet I will keep running, to town hall meetings and to stay sane. I will keep writing to defend and to support community. And I will keep using the language of the whole of the American people to support the First Amendment.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com