About that Running Thing ...

Earlier in this blog I wrote about learning to play guitar, and how beginning to play guitar had many useful similarities with learning to write a dissertation, not to mention learning to live into an anti-racist identity.

The most important similarity, of course, is being willing to mess up. You may recall the mental bumpersticker that goes along with that: "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." At first.

I loved learning to make fairly musical noise on the guitar, but hit a wall when it came time to switch over from finger-picking notes to actual chord-strumming. My beloved M. -- a guitar player from way back -- has tried to help me, but learning to play the guitar requires a basic willingness to make noise, and somehow I don't have that. Yet. Maybe because my noises just aren't musical enough yet. Or, maybe I have just retained a certain childhood certainty that quiet is safe, and safety is not a sure thing, and so quiet is best.

There is another and more obvious reason for laying down the guitar, for a little while: the posture for guitar playing -- at least when you are learning -- is a lot like the posture for writing or reading. And I spend way too much time in that posture already. Too, the activity of learning musical notation and to make music is a lot like learning a foreign language, and right now I need something completely different.

Like running.

I started running at about the same time I set the guitar aside, though that was unintentional. I just wanted to get a little more exercise without driving to the gym for a workout class or to lift weights. (Somehow driving somewhere in order to get exercise just makes less and less sense.)

I had heard about this music source called Podrunner: Intervals (you can find it on iTunes or at the creator's web site, http://www.djsteveboy.com/intervals.html) and I tried it out. The idea is that you listen to the music as you run, and music changes cue shifts in running or walking speed and duration. Using Podrunner, I have worked up to an 8k distance, or a little over five miles in about 50 minutes.

Which is astounding to me. Less than a year ago I was in a workout class and the instructor had us run an indoor lap and I could barely finish.

But intervals are a great way to increase speed and strength and distance gradually, and I am happy for anything that helps me keep moving and relatively fit.

As my distance and fitness increased, a funny thing happened: I began to be able to think while running. And I noticed that when I am thinking about my dissertation, I run a little faster and with less discomfort. Alternatively, when I am thinking about something that I feel worried or sad or angry about, I have more trouble running. I am intrigued by these signs of the connections among my thoughts, feelings and physical abilities.

I remember in the year after I came out to God and myself and lost a bunch of weight in the process, there was a day when I was playing with my kids (who were then 11 and 9) and realizing I could chase them around. I was running. Out of curiosity, I began running then, back in 2003, but could not get more than a mile or so into a run before I was too bored or tired or something hurt. I kept up with workout classes and biking, but let the running go.

Until I discovered intervals, and slowly began increasing my distance, and learned that the first mile or two is always the hardest; even now that I am running a little over five miles, it is the first part of the run that is the hardest, even if I stretch and warm up really well. I've also discovered that the more often I run, the easier that beginning stage is.

And that got me to thinking about writing.

Back when I was in college, I picked up Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, which is about writing as a Zen practice. Natalie says you should write every day; that writing is a muscle, and like any other muscle, it needs work to be strong, and stretching to be flexible.

I tried that for a while ... got bored and distracted and quit.

And then I read the same thing in Madeleine L'Engle's memoir, A Circle of Quiet. And then a third time the advice came, when a friend and I decided to read (and do the work in) Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way.

I usually get the hint when the universe tells me a third time to do something, so I adopted Cameron's "morning pages" and have stayed fairly regular with the discipline of writing something every day. I fall off the wagon now and then, and have learned that not judging myself too harshly makes it easier to climb back in. I have accumulated about ten years' worth of spiral notebooks (the writing equivalent of running shoes and a road).

In writing, as in running, as in any disciplined activity, regular practice or exercise makes regular performance or execution far easier. Your thinking mind or your bicep or your lungs or your writing hand ... makes no difference. Your body needs your mind to tell it to keep going; your mind needs your body to be fit enough to sit and write, or focus and read.

And of course, body and mind are incomplete, too, without spirit. This I learned for real only after my coming-out process began. I did not know how dis-integrated I was, until I became integrated, body, mind and spirit. Prayer was revolutionized in the process: I had asked my spiritual director for years why I could not feel God's love. I knew it was pouring down on me, like a constant and invisible rain, but I thought I should be able to feel it, and I could not. This felt like a failing to me.

Slowly but surely, as the realization of my lesbian identity unfolded, so did my prayer life. I could feel myself going to deeper and deeper places in my self and in God when I prayed, or -- as it felt -- when prayer was happening in me. I realized that my self-knowing and self-loving were key ways that God knew me and loved me. If I could not love myself, then God could not love me through that avenue, either. In being cut off from myself, I had cut myself off from God. In coming into a fuller awareness of myself, I came into a fuller awareness of God.

This integration was startling in the intensity and viscerality of its effects. My coming out process began the year before I started this Ph.D. program, and I remember in the first year of the program, there were times I was sitting in class, participating in discussion, reading a new text, when I felt as if I would jump out of my chair, I felt such a keen and physical excitement. Sometimes the heat of intellectual passion literally ignited a sensual response in my body, and I knew what Audre Lorde said about erotic energy being the life force in an integrated self was absolutely true. I knew it in my own body. I know it still.

Which brings me back to running. And writing. And the natural interconnections of an integrated life. Just as I got to thinking about these interconnections, I stumbled across a book title and knew immediately I had to read it: Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. It's a memoir writting by a long-distance runner who also is a novelist.

Murakami notes some interconnections among his writing and running; some of them we share, and some we don't. As I read the book, I realized I experience some interconnections that are unique to me. Here are a few of the first and the latter.

Like Murakami, I have learned the value of momentum: if you stop running at a point when you still feel strong, you are more likely to run again; similarly, if you stop writing at a point when you are going strong, it will be easier to get started again the next working day.

Murakami says he often writes to know what he thinks; I do this, too. I often don't really know my thoughts clearly on a topic until I have written about it (and, I have noticed, what I will write and how I will say it changes over the years, as time and experience shape my perceptions, even if I am writing again about the same event).

Murakami describes himself as someone who is capable of being happy on his own -- an important trait for a writer, which requires long hours of solitude -- and that he is not interested in team sports or particularly competitive sports; he really only competes with himself. I too need a certain amount of alone-time, and typically am happy on my own; but I have such an abhorrence of competition that I really will not even compete with myself. I do not time my runs, or set goals to exceed; I just try to keep running, and writing, and living, as well as I can, on any given day. Each outing, each effort has its own integrity, and I try to be my best in each one, simply because that is the simplest, truest way to experience abundant fulfillment.

Like Murakami, I am happy with running's low-maintenance nature; all you need are shoes and a road (well, and a good sports bra, I have to add). And a dose of discipline: all runners and writers know that you have to get through the days you don't want to run, or to write, and do it anyway. That's the nature of discipline; and that's where treating all running and writing as practice is useful. When the running isn't going well, or the writing feels stiff or blind, treat it as practice and keep moving. That way tomorrow has a chance to be better.

Murakami decribes the three necessary qualities of good writing (and running) as talent, focus and endurance. Murakami describes focus and endurance as qualities that can be developed; he is less sanguine about the ability to cultivate talent.

Focus is something I struggle for, and balance is important, too ... rather than talent, I think a third ingredient is "something to say." Which seems not to apply to running, unless you generalize to something like "desire." Maybe I am kidding myself, but I think desire or passion are more important even than talent. If you have a reason to and want to run, or write, you will, and nothing will stop you.

Running is schooling my mind and my body ... and my spirit. My legs are stronger, and so is my belief in my own ability to endure and persist. My "wind" lasts longer, and so does my ability to stay in the flow of a writing. My tolerance for struggle is growing, as is my willingness to stay in that struggle. When my mind is tired of reaching for the words, I think of how I felt in the third mile yesterday, and how much better the fourth and fifth miles felt, and I push a little harder until the words are flowing again.

When I am running, there are voices in my head that say "this hurts, let's quit" or "that's far enough" or "maybe I won't be able to run all the way back." I have learned that these voices are impostors, and that I can listen for and hear the truer voice whispering from somewhere in the back of my head. That voice just says "keep going." And "it's worth it." And "you can do this."

I need to know the sound of that voice when the world interferes with the dissertation. Those impostor voices say "Who wants to read about love?" and "This is all so obvious." Or "you are not post-colonial enough" or "you are not anti-racist enough" or "you are talking to yourself and no one will want to read this." Or, worst of all, "You are not doing and can not do justice to the idea God has put in your head ... if it was in fact God."

The true voice says, "You can do this. It's worth doing. It needs doing. Just pray some more ... write some more, pray some more, run some more, and then rewrite. Some more."

Two more chapters and an epilogue -- by Christmas, I hope -- and the first draft is done. The block of marble will have been assembled, and I can begin to carve. Because the process of rewriting is where all good writing gets done.

Help me, Beloved. Help me do justice to this idea. Your love, your justice, your grace, which we all need so much more of.

(And then maybe I can get back around to that guitar ... and maybe a triathlon? That should get me through the job search process!)