I Run to Meet Myself

In times of crisis, I run. Not away, but through. About a mile into a run, my soul, body and mind get in step, superfluous thoughts, those beyond breathing, those beyond don't trip, those beyond watch where you're going and take everything in, superfluous thoughts bead and roll away with my sweat.

It's not a surprise or a coincidence that during some of the biggest transitional times in my life, that running has been a means of knowing myself, of knowing my heart, and of being right in my body. It takes me to places that planes, trains, automobiles or bikes can't reach. In some ways, each run can be a pilgrimage.

Since ancient times pilgrimages have been conducted from place to place, in belief that a question can travel into an answer as water into thirst... the only rule of travel is, Don't come back the way you went. Come a new way. - Anne Carson, "The Anthropology of Water."

Pilgrimage is a word used to describe a journey, both physical and spiritual, to a sacred place. Maybe a temple, shrine, church, speakeasy, tavern (hey, don't question what sacred means to different folks ;), a journey that changes the pilgrim, transforms them in a meaningful way. I remember the first time I ran the 10-ish miles from Oxford to Easton, a trip made daily in a car, and that I had made a number of times by bike, but doing it on foot, never stopping to walk, felt like as significant a 10-miles as I could have run. My first trail race, my first marathon, the significance was finishing the distance, the course, not where I ended up. But the pilgrimage-typed runs for me are often not to anywhere in particular.

Pilgrims were people who figured things out as they walked. - Anne Carson, same as above.

Thank you, Anne. That's it exactly. Figuring things out as I run. Sometimes consciously, sometimes not. Sometimes it's the sweat that cleanses. Sometimes I've exhaled something I couldn't abide. Sometimes I've breathed in something I desperately needed, though I couldn't tell you at which point or mile I found it, just that I did. Maybe.

Where do I "go" on these personal pilgrimages? Maybe I go "away."

Being "away" is the true freedom. I escape to where I want to be, thinking what I want to think, creating what I want to create. - George Sheehan, "Running and Being"

Sheehan has as much to teach as maybe any other runner/writer has said about running, thinking and the soul. But I am not sure he has just what I mean here. There are times I run to escape, escape the day, escape bills, escape a mood, escape life, but there are just as many times that I run to live. To think. To solve.

I suck at sitting meditation. If my body is still, my mind wants to move faster. Yoga, Tai Chi, better. Running seems to put everything in place.

Motion and meditation are apparently a unity. "Sit as little as possible," wrote Nietzsche. "Give no credence to any thought that was not born outdoors, while one moved about freely--in which the muscles are not celebrating a feast, too." - George Sheehan (and Nietzsche), "Running and Being"

Thank you, George. That's more to it. Motion and meditation are a unity. That's how it feels. Thoughts born or grown on a run seem to have more substance, because they have come after, or because of, other thoughts falling away.

So what is it I am trying to learn when I run? I wonder...

Pilgrims were people wondering, wondering. Whom shall I meet now? - Anne Carson, take a guess ;)

I've met some awesome people through running. A fair amount of my close friends now I have spent some time on the roads or trails with. I spend a lot more time wondering than knowing. Safe to say I don't know much. But where running becomes a pilgrimage, where it becomes a journey on foot to the soul, I know who I run to meet.

I run to meet myself.

Reminiscing with Sid

I reminisce for a spell, or shall I say think back... - Pete Rock and C. L. Smooth

I think Sid Vicious was right. Not about much, but maybe about stepping stones. I'm not sure stepping stones exist. If they do, you can't see them. Not until you get to the end and turn around. Stepping stones exist only in hindsight. Only as a reminiscence. You couldn't have known it at the time.

Calling something--a period of time, a job, a person, a relationship--a stepping stone purely negates it. Being a line cook in restaurants wasn't where I ultimately wanted to end up, but it is something that is as much a part of me now as any other job. It is a period of time full of great people, and memories, and late nights, and laughs, and people who are still close friends. It wasn't a stepping stone, it was then.

He lets this brilliant shape move through time like a needle stitching together the two moments that compose nostalgia. Then and now. - Anne Carson, "Plainwater"

Thank you, Anne. That's what I meant. Stitching together THEN and NOW. That's the only way something can look like a stepping stone. But remember what Jurassic Park has taught us, objects in mirror (past) are closer than they appear.

Maybe reminiscing is time travel and nostalgia is that sense of floating through time and space, of actually feeling those two moments being stitched together, and we wear those stitched threads like an old sweater that we can't let go of no matter how many holes it has. We can't let go of the past, we can't forget, we want it to help make sense of the now, the future.

Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. - Robert Hass, "Meditation at Lagunitas."

Shit, Bob, don't bring that up now. Why do we have to bring longing and desire into this? I was just trying to cut out into Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth and let the sound wash over. You can reminisce without longing, right? When we look back to a simpler time, prior to bills, prior to taxes, prior to heartbreak and death, when we look back to innocence, we don't have to flip the bird at experience, right?

Maybe we do want that simpler time. Before desire created distances we aren't sure we can traverse. Before hurt pulled us into ourselves. When it was harder to tell the difference between dreams and the every day, because we could see our dreams more clearly, every day.

Maybe it is Dream, our dreams, that float above us and stitch together then and now. To remind us. To show us, it wasn't a stepping stone, maybe you stepped off the path, maybe you are on the wrong river bank, maybe you need to look back, re-route, face forward, open eyes, open heart, sun rising on new days, new feelings, new.

But first, reminisce for a spell...

Running alone through the dark and back yard happy hours

A packed house is when I feel the most alone. Bar scene, packed house, music blaring, I am pretty well alone. Background noise to the forefront, sound becomes gray, I float on the outside of conversations. I've always felt the outsider.

But that goes back further than bars and crowds. Never fully identifying. Never knowing exactly where I fit in. I remember, high school era, four of us cruising in a car one night and our friend sitting in the back seat next to me looked around the car and said, "Check it out man, we've got a rasta, a skinhead, a longhair, and a... a... a Mike!" And at the time feeling like, well, shit, how come I'm not anything? And then realizing that that may have been the greatest compliment I have ever received. At a time when we were labeling, no label fit.

Among soccer players, I became a skateboarder; among skateboarders, I became a writer; among writers, I became a runner; but was all those things. The thing about it, is all those things, shifts, evolution, I don't know what to call it, happened without thought. It felt more like peeling off some other superfluous part of me to get to what was inside. And when I didn't think about it, it felt good.

But thinking. And man, I am guilty of chronic over-thinking. When I would sit and think about it, the end result was... alone. And Camus is right, if you make too much of defining happiness, you likely won't be happy; if you make the search for the meaning of life everything, chances are you aren't living.

So what does that mean for the outsider, the over-thinker, the stuck in my head? It means happy hour. It means go for a run. It means paddleboarding, skateboarding. It means find your niche, maybe.

Funny things can happen with time. And this came up in conversation recently, where at one point, feeling always a little outside, a bit different, standing within but not a part of the group, sucked, at some point it became the only perspective I wanted. It became what I dug most, that it wasn't any one group. It was maybe a group of one.

And even more odd, when that made sense, comfort in difference, you start to know yourself, and show yourself a bit more, you start running into other folks more and more like you. I think about our group of running friends. On a morning when we would run, I would start out from my house, running through the still dark. Over the next few miles, other folks are doing the same, running alone through the dark. And then we would each come into a familiar glow, the streetlight of the corner where we always met. And there would be four or five of us, together, running through the dark, smiles, conversations, questions, stories, sweat, soles hitting pavement.

And I got thinking about that more clearly the other night, at a back yard happy hour, celebrating/seeing off friends who are moving out of town. And I talked to the elementary art teacher about skateboarding, about Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian," and talking to the brewmaster about Liverpool, and talking to the physician's assistant about malt liquor and Camelbacks, and watching the photographer shotgun a craft beer, and watching all of our kids attempting to pole vault across the yard with bamboo poles, or playing soccer, or climbing on the swingset.

And I looked at the assembled group, the folks and families around me, and thought/felt, yep. That's it. I am not a crowded bar, I am a back yard happy hour.

And this may have nothing or everything to do with all this, but I read it this morning and it is stuck in my head. So now you can have it...

We live by tunneling for we are people buried alive. To me, the tunnels you make will seem strangely aimless, uprooted orchids. But the fragrance is undying. - Anne Carson, "Plainwater."

Are you gonna eat that melancholy? Part 1, Nox

I f#%ing hate the word melancholy. It's like a fruit that can't admit it's a vegetable. And either way, you don't want it on your plate.

But here I sit, last at the table, in a staredown with melancholy and I can't stomach it. I want it to extract itself, move off the plate of its own accord so I don't have to eat that shit.

And there it sits. I've been sick. It's been cold. Couped up, cabin-fevered, little sunlight. And generally I'm an upbeat cat, but, man.

I've been sitting with three brilliant writers, muses really, who I am smitten with and shaken by, who are hip to some rough revelations about humanity.

Anne Carson (above). Joan Didion. C.D. Wright.

I've got some Buddhist in me. I fathom our transitory being, impermanence, non-attachment. But I have a rough time with death and our whole corporeal rodeo here.

Carson. Her book Nox. It's big. As a book and as a physical work of art and collage, yeah, but it is large in scope as well. The book is an elegy for her brother, who died and with whom she wasn't close in their adult lives.

She is thinking elegy, which leads her to history. She is a classics scholar, so history leads to Herodotus. Here is Carson's take on the Big Poppa of history:

Herodotus is a historian who trains you to think as you read. It is a process of asking, searching, collecting, doubting, striving, testing, blaming and above all standing amazed at the strange things humans do. Now by far the strangest thing that humans do--he is firm on this--is history. This asking.

This process, this asking, this is the kind of stuff that makes me tick. It gets me fired up. It's how I am wired, digging into the big questions. And Carson rightly connects elegy to history, and vice-versa, as they both run square into death. Yikes. Let me grab a beer here.

Carson being Carson, she digs into word origins, includes scraps of letters from her brother, mother, and juxtaposes some poignant, personal history with the broad historical sweep.

She looks the melancholy on her plate square in the snout (of course, it's not likely that a fruitgetable would have a snout, but it's a working metaphor, so play along), swallows it down and moves on to her potatoes. Meat and potatoes seem like something you should eat to balance your melancholy.

So there is this beautiful elegy/history construct in the form of Nox and Carson to deal with. That's part one of the mental malaise that's swirling at the moment, which is necessarily catching me different based on the winter, kicking the whole body cold, the getting older, the asking the big questions.

I need to go for a run, do some yoga, too snowy to hit the longboard. Get out of the house. Like maybe to Hawaii. That'll work.