When I was growing up my sisters asked me several times what my dream house would look like, and one day they handed me a charcoal pencil and a pad and me me draw it. My psyche was in true harmony when I had a mix of aline time and team time. You must forget the internal voice screaming, begging, “Not one more step!” You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past. The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place…belief is irresistible. …the man who moves the mountain begins by carrying away small stones…Įach day at noon I’d walk down the street to the local travel agency and stand like Walter Mitty before the posters in the window. You cannot travel the path until you have become the path yourself, said the Buddha. Inner voice, outer voices, it’s all the same. To study the self, said the thirteenth-century Zen master Drogen, is to forget the self. Self is the bald-faced lie we tell ourselves daily, and happiness requires seeing through the lei, debunking it. Self is a mirage, a fever dream, and our stubborn belief in its reality not only wastes life, but shortens it. And yet en declares plainly that the self doesn’t exist. In every religion, it seemed t, self is the obstacle, the enemy. I marvelled at the concept of kensho, or satori - enlightenment that comes in a flash, a blinding pop. It was my first real awareness that not everyone in this world will like us, that we’re often cast aside at the very moment we most need to be included.

A small setback, in the grand scheme, but it knocked me sideways.

I’d known this about myself since high school, freshman year, when I got cut from the baseball team. I wasn’t built for heavy doses of rejection.

You tell yourself that you’re running toward some goal, chasing some rush, but really you run because the alternative, stopping, scare you to death.įront runners always work the hardest, and risk the most You run and run, mile after mile, and you never quite know why. It’s all in how you frame it, how you sell it to yourself. Whatever pleasures or gains you derive from the act of running, you must find them within. It’s not just that there’s no finish line it’s that you define the finish line. At least, none that can fully justify the effort. When you run around an oval track, or down an empty road, you have no real destination.

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