I’ve been fielding a few questions from friends lately about how I’m holding up — the body, the mind — given the mileage and wear and tear. It’s been leading me to contemplate the other question I keep getting asked: “Why?” “Why are you doing this?”
There’s the mountain answer — because it’s there. There’s the snarky, “Why not?” And there’s the mostly true answer involving stress relief, an attempt to maintain my health, and the excuse to see the world.
But there’s also another answer, one that I would also occasionally contemplate the few times I hit a bar with friends. Why do people drink, and more specifically why am I drinking? To remember, to forget, and a combination of the two. It’s the same with me for running — to remember, to forget, and a combo thereof.
Am I running toward or away from something? Both. Neither. I don’t know.
The visage of my dead father stares back at me from the mirror these days. Ghosts haunt me more than ever, choices I’ve made or avenues I’ve not pursued, memories of both what has happened and what I thought might have happened all dance through my dreams and waking thoughts. Time and space have caught up to me.
I’m feeling the weight of all that. I’m feeling the notion that as I gaze at the sun it is more often a sunset rather than a sunrise. I’m no wunderkid, nor a young gun who shows promise. I’ve become soft in the middle and softer in the head and it has left me reeling.
The joy of running to me is that there is a definite start and finish to each one. There’s a distance to cover and there’s a time it takes to do so. There’s contemplation and solace… perhaps too much of that at times… and camraderie amongst strangers all seeking to achieve their own distance and time goals. But there is a finish — there is a line in the proverbial sand that once crossed marks a completion. Could there be improvement? For another time, yes, but there is just that moment of finality before considerations of what comes next.
Life however has been a continuum, an ever flowing current that bears us along; occasionally I’ve tried to back paddle or alter course but such efforts have shown me shortcomings more often than my smarts. I suppose there is an end line for life too, one I’m loath to ponder too heavily as it would only send me deeper into a morass. But perhaps I need to do that since I’m viewing life of late as lacking the completion elements of a run. In the macro perhaps life is little more than the micro completions I need to focus upon — that life is that race requiring training, diligence, commitment, and ultimately perseverance against seemingly overwhelming odds.
It’s been a strange week, filled with setbacks and odd detours. That’s the trouble with striving for a daily blog post — sometimes too much of the (hopefully) ephemeral real moment seeps in and skews the prose.
To end on a lighter note, here’s a shot of a weird cross promotion I came across this morning during my 4:30 AM run through Hollywood. If one has just seen “The King and I” revival at the Pantages, one now has the option to cap the evening at a local strip club.
There’s a reason it’s sometimes called Holly-weird.
