I know I’ve said it somewhere before: I run to cope. Not that (in the global sense of things) I have anything gruesomely heavy to cope with; my stuff is the ordinary, mundane stuff almost everyone faces at one time or another. Loneliness for instance. Discouragement. Myopia. Sticky Countertops. Disorganizational Malaise (such as lost social security cards). Heartache (which I’ve affectionately nicknamed a cracked sternum, fighting depression with humor). Nothing really terrible. (Though I am forty, and though random things like the turn of a newborn baby’s face or a farmer’s sepia-toned drawl make me want to either burst into tears, or beg to be invited to dinner, I refuse, REFUSE, to classify any of my stuff as “midlife crisis”).
Running not only supplies me with an abundance of oxygen and endorphins, it more importantly unwinds lilliputian strands of sadness and angst that would otherwise gather and immobilize me. I think differently when I run. I see differently when I run. I connect with the world differently when I run.
I don’t think deep thoughts when I’m running. Well, maybe I do think deep thoughts, but they don’t soar into networks of elaborate connections. They don’t arabesque and careen in jittery flight. They stay right there with me on the ground, quite singular, as one foot plops in front of the other in an inexorable rhythm. My mind can’t argue with the rhythm. It can’t go off on tangents as I breathe strategically, trying to keep my diaphragm limber and my sides from stitching. Thoughts keep pace with legs, going something like this: “tree, oh tree, oh calico calico tree. Huh, huh, huh. Tree.” It reminds me of Lamaze breathing, the rhythm coaxing my mind to be ok in the moment. Sometimes my brain, being a brain, breaks free and gets fancy, and says “sure, calico tree, doesn’t that remind you of some intaglio from your convoluted past and isn’t it about time to psychoanalyze this and while we’re at it let’s unravel the meaning of Frank’s travel and what or who are you now that all your children are in school or even grown up and speaking of trees shouldn’t we figure out why you’re so afraid of aging?”—Like my dad reading a tearjerker novel out loud, my brain is intent on making me cry, but my legs interrupt (huh, huh, huh) and my mind calms down again into “tree, oh tree”, and I (because to a certain extent, let’s not forget this, I am my brain) am ok in the moment again.
Add music via an iphone and headset to this feet-on-the-ground plopping ritual, and my thoughts still stay with my feet, if I have coherent thoughts at all. The music often replaces them. Meanwhile my body is caught up in the euphoria of melody and rhythm and lyrics. It is all I can do not to break into dance (and when I’m certain I’m alone and unwatched, I might). Let’s face it : Dancing versus giving the floor to crazy wayward thoughts–that’s good therapy.
Maybe it is the fact that I feel pain (like all humans) that makes beautiful things appear particularly vivid and poignant (particularly on a morning run). Like the fluid, bright gesture of a John Singer Sargent portrait, illuminated against a shadowy jewel case background. (It is interesting to me that while sometimes Sargent may have wished to be identified with the Impressionists, he stubbornly and un-Impressionistically insisted on keeping black as an important player in his palette). I’m running, my thoughts are grounded, and they move as readily and steadily with what I see as they do with the plop plop plop of my feet. I lift my eyes and catch the radiance of a clump of pasture flax backlit by sunlight like stained glass; my heart rolls over in my chest (huh huh blue oh blue thank you thank you blue huh), and the beauty is fervently and potently imprinted. Somewhere. Actually, I feel the imprint in my fissured sternum, and am convinced that this is one good way to heal cracks—with stained glass flower/weeds, or possibly goats content in a pasture. If there is a lost Sargent, it ought to be a white goat nibbling in a weedy plot. I am so in love with goats lately. If I stop running to soak in the beauty, to give it my full, unswerving gaze, to think, it is a lovely moment indeed, definitely worth taking time for, but it seems… Less. Less focused. Not quite as condensed as when it comes in a flash with the huh huh huh.
I like being part of the world when I run. Sometimes when I’m shopping in a crowd or driving in cranky traffic I feel slightly depressed in the world, or maybe oppressed by it. Like my life in Earth’s context might be invisible, or meaningless. But I feel such a connection with the world when I’m running in it. I have multiplied my routes this summer; each offers its own version of scenes: houses old and new, pastures, fields. Thriving, relaxed samples of local culture. A dirt and gravel road takes me past (gasp!) hedgerows of wild plums tangled with wild roses (when I realized that those were PLUMS! plums growing wild and purply blushed, co-habitating with pumpkin-red rosehips, I wanted to bring someone with me just to show it all off). On another road, I have met the most amazing red hibiscus (perhaps amazing because running past it is always an up close and personal encounter). One house has trumpet vines that have been there so long, groomed so fastidiously I think for decades, they have become trees. Each vine’s trunk is as thick and gnarled as an ancient tree, each stands entirely alone, free of any support, and the leaves are cropped neatly in a tree shape at the top. Nothing else blooms in the tidy green yard but the two trumpet vine trees; it is (I think by accident) a very minimalist yard. Another of my favorite houses also has a trumpet vine crowding the sidewalk, provocative and flirty, while the house sits modest and prim, far from the road, a tiny white thing catching the morning light in a great expanse of haphazard lawn and overgrown trees. In late spring/early summer, lilacs bloom near its corner. Who planted these things?
