Running and Non-Being

Thank God we can still go running.  There’s nothing to train for, since all the races and tennis tournaments have been cancelled.  Nonetheless, I’ve been going for long runs on Saturdays, and I’ve found myself adding one more mile every week, up to 11 as of last Saturday.  I suppose I will keep going.

There are obvious reasons for this: trying to stay in shape, getting outdoors, etc.  Fortunately spring comes earlier in Geneva than it does in Boston.  When I was flying back and forth a lot, it seemed like the leaves would appear on the trees here all of a sudden.  But this year I’ve been able to watch its gradual encroachment.  The trees are almost full now, which softens the landscape and warms the heart.  It also suggests to me an indifferent creator who goes about her business, pandemic or not.  My friend Nicola said that she felt like the planet wanted us all to stop so it could breathe a little.

As one runs longer, a queer thing starts to happen to one’s perception of the distance.  Things start to get relative.  What seemed like a long way to run a few weeks ago doesn’t seem like such a big deal.  I’ve experienced this before when training for longer races.  I suppose there’s also a similar phenomenon going on in our collective assessment of the covid tables in the newspaper.  Not long ago, it seemed horrific that Italy would have 10,000 total cases; in the past 24 hours, more than half that number of people died from the disease.  The last time I was in an airport, I noted warily that there were eight total cases in Geneva; this morning, the local newspaper was celebrating that there were “only” ten new cases diagnosed yesterday.  We are shocked, as we should be, as the numbers get bigger.  But at the same time each individual case starts to mean less.  Each life becomes marginalized, in the economic sense of “marginal.”

There is a less obvious aspect of long runs, which starts to reveal itself to me once I start going beyond 10 miles or so.  Murakami, in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, writes about how, during a 24-hour endurance run, his felt his ego begin to disintegrate.  My experience is obviously less extreme, but I get glimpses of that: at a certain point, it’s as if I were taking a hammer to my psyche which had been trapped inside a Zoom window 12 hours a day for the past month.  My thoughts become not my own.  Not like I’m hallucinating exactly (although I’ve heard that that can happen), but like they are flowing, very quickly, both from within me and from somewhere else.  This is very hard to describe.  Perhaps this is aided by the fact that I don’t listen to music or anything when I run.  Last Saturday it manifested in a torrent of thoughts which came so fast that I couldn’t even grasp them as they went by.  This feeling is both alienating and strangely pleasant.

Nowadays, we tend to think about ascetics (to the extent we think about them at all) as wackos: backward ignoramuses whose forms of self-denial – fasting, living as hermits in caves or on the tops of columns – were nothing more than strong indicators of mental illness.  I’m tempted to cut them a little slack, especially after a long run.  In 2020, we hear the term "mortification of the flesh," and it sounds like no more than self-punishment: an expression of shame and unworthiness that is both irrational and unhealthy.  But back in the day this was seen as an essential step in contemplation, in the direct experience of God.  Bonaventure’s Threefold Way lays this out quite neatly: through purgation, illumination, and perfection, you may encounter the Divine, not just as some faraway concept, but through your own direct experience.  Bernard McGinn, in the excellent Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, sums it up nicely: “Asceticism is seen as a necessary, if not sufficient, preparation for mystical grace…The divine nature in its majesty, goodness, and purity is so far removed from the imperfect world that for any created being to dare approach God implies a purification that goes beyond just overcoming the effects of sin…It becomes something like an essential condition for anyone who seeks God in this life.”

If you prefer (as I generally do) not to get too hung up on the “sin” part, note this is not far from the Buddhist concept of non-self.  If you're looking for a similar effect minus the knee damage, meditation can work just fine. The point is that self-annihilation, in one form or another, is a prerequisite for transcendence.

For a much deeper and more cogent exploration of all this, I can't recommend the classic Running and Being, by Dr. George Sheehan, highly enough.