Why We Show Up

The sun’s barely even up yet.

Your muscles ache from yesterday.

It’s cold.

You rub sleep from your eyes and open the car door anyway. Then walk in. Your energy lifts.

It’s quiet. The music hasn’t even been put on yet.

Then you see them. The familiar faces. Reliable characters of your morning routine.

There’s the dad squeezing in his 0630 session before the school run.
The twenty-something who trains alone, every day, no matter what.
The middle-aged woman who keeps to herself in the corner.

You smile at them. They smile back.

Before you know it, what was on your mind isn’t taking centre stage anymore. It doesn’t seem to demand so much of your attention now you’re here.

Then the rest of the morning crew filters in. You chat. About the workout. About your weekend. About life.

You don’t know what it is that drives them. Sometimes you don’t even know what it is that drives you. Not really.

But something forced you out of bed when all you wanted to do was hit the snooze button.

Something made you put your workout gear on and leave the house while most people are still asleep.

And something drives you to come here. To ask more of yourself. To push yourself to exhaustion in pursuit of something you know you’ll probably never really reach.

Again. And again. And again.

Because you know there’s no finish line. All of us do. In our own way.

But here we are again. By choice.

And that’s what “like-minded people” means.  To most of us at least.

It’s not that we all share the same goals. Or that those goals grow from the same place. But we all show up for something.

Some of us have a clearer understanding of what that drive is. They can clearly define their sense of purpose and articulate it.

For others it’s just a drive. An unexplainable, constant draw to turn up no matter what.

And that’s the bond.

The invisible bond of shared effort that creates the backbone of the community.

It’s in the shared nod of respect you give to the person you don’t really know every morning.

It’s in the unexpected relationships you’ve made with those you’ve pushed yourself alongside.

It’s in the encouragement you scream for those fighting for the same thing as you.

And that sense of unspoken commitment ties us all together despite how different we might all seem from the outside.

It isn’t just what we do. It’s in our collective choice to keep doing it.