WHY DO YOU RUN?

I’m reading a book about running. I am increasing my running days per week. It’s the only discipline that keeps the weight off me and keeps my muscles lean, long and lanky. It keeps my brain sane. I like running. I like the way it makes me feel.

I never thought myself to be someone who runs to run away from something. I run to run towards something. I run alone mostly. I somehow don’t do so well in groups. My why when it comes to running is not to connect with people but instead with myself and nature. Running in the mountain in a group just seems like a recipe for overwhelm and anxiety. I don’t like those emotions much.

Liking things and not liking things is an important gauge of my well being. Choosing what I like to do and doing less of the things I don’t feels like an albeit selfish right I have earned. Life gives us many opportunities. Choice lies at the core of them. I have chosen simplicity. Once I understood the peace that comes with simplicity I started cultivating my life around it.

Sitting writing this I think back over life up until now. The past few months have brought up some serious reminiscing about people, places and situations that are no longer. Lovers that have come and gone. Relationships that didn’t work out. I look at friends who have bought the house, had the kids. Seemingly a measure of success in western society. I see the friends trying to change the world, committing their lives to a greater cause and the greater good of man kind. Receiving respectable gasps and big praise. I see the friends excelling in the art scene, sports scene and professional arenas. They seem very important. Disclaimer, I would like any of those titles. Writing about what I am observing and what it makes me feel is not a stab at you, so if you have the house and the kids pipe down. The sarcasm and the humor is me creating distance between the discomfort I feel over my own reality at times. A pang of guilt just stabbed my heart as I admit that life didn’t turn out the way I pictured it. It’s not a bad thing, its just the truth.

I still want to know why we are here. The majority of my time is spent going to therapy and being good to my body by nourishing myself well, something I only learned late in life. Working through trauma so I can have wholesome relationships and actually adult. I am constantly in a phase of deconstruction in order to build better mannerisms to show up in life with. I am learning to be good to myself so I can be good to others. It truly softens the world around me, a priceless act really. Taking responsibility for my life, my actions, my emotions. Stepping into what is and letting go of what used to be. The work is not fun. It is hard. It is tiring. It is uncomfortable. It is lonely. And it is constant. What is that saying…ignorance is bliss. Well fuck ignorance, that boat has sailed and I am clearly swimming home, the long way.

I guess in this case running home, the long way.

I live on a farm at the foot of the Cape Point mountains. I rent a cottage here where life is quiet, consistent and peaceful. The life I have cultivated for myself is next level epic and I am deeply grateful for it. I often have to pinch myself to make sure I am not dreaming. But this life I have cultivated for myself has also given me the time and space to reflect, heal, take stock and really sit with how things are and not how I make them out to be. Being a dreamer and all. So in all honesty it has been the best few years but also the most harsh few years of really coming to terms with what I have lost in order to gain the life I live today.

I won’t go into much detail now but every choice comes with a price. The house, kids, marriage, no house, no kids, no marriage. Best to read up on the consequences of your choices as you won’t get a free out of jail card for those.

Running has been one of the greatest reality checks through out my life. It files my brain. Loosens stuck emotions because movement is powerful like that. It puts things into perspective and brings me into the present moment, to sit with what is going on right now, right here, with me.

I leave you with an excerpt from a book I am currently reading:

“This is the reality we live: aspiring to be our best, longing for and sometimes finding meaning and connection within ourselves and with that which is larger than ourselves, we are undone by messy bathrooms, traffic jams, and burnt toast. I am not interested in a spirituality that cannot encompass my humanness. I find little comfort or guidance in traditional dogma or unqualified New Age optimism. Because beneath the small daily trials are harder paradoxes, things the mind cannot reconcile but the heart must hold if we are to live fully: profound tiredness and radical hope; shattered beliefs and relentless faith; the seemingly contradictory longings for personal freedom and a deep commitment to others, for solitude and intimacy, for the ability to simply be with the world and the need to change what we know is not right about how we are living” – Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Invitation