As I dragged the black belt to the ground with my full weight and gasped for breath at the edge of my ability to stay conscious while three other students punched and kicked at him, I watched his head hit the mats and put up a defensive hand to make sure another student didn’t follow him down and add weight on his neck.

We had more than 80 years of practice between the five of us, and that sentence tells the story of a moment that was mundane for us and perhaps unique in the world. It was 4-vs-1 with minimal rules and maximum intensity, but my level of care was redundant to everyone else’s. The black belt back stood up and we did it again.

It was an incredible night of practice. The stuff of legend. And I started it exhausted and unhappy.

I could barely stay awake all that morning & afternoon. The day before, I’d fought a migraine for 12 hours. I could barely focus at work. I wasn’t sleeping well. I got sucker-punched by community work I wasn’t expecting, and spent hours reflecting if the work was worth it at all.

But two days prior, I’d spent all day & night catching up with a close friend. We laughed & cried in turns as day became the dead of night, then we cooked frozen pizzas and laughed & cried some more. It was cathartic, meaningful, joyful, and challenging. It was a deeply rewarding night, born of an unlikely series of circumstances and difficult emotional work.

Before that, more difficult days. Coping with burnout at work. Trying to establish new patterns for the new year. Literally doing the laundry of community work. Difficult, grinding, tiring stuff.

It was quite a roller coaster of a week.

What I am left with is two moments of incredible privilege: The emotional intensity of my friend’s honesty, and the physical intensity of my partners on the mats. Anyone should feel privileged to have had either of those moments in their life, let alone days apart. But most of my week still felt like the shit that filled the spaces between them.

Isn’t that a perfect microcosm of our lives? We focus on the shit and so quickly forget the moments of privileged practice we had. Maybe we could all resolve to hold onto them a little harder.