I’ve said this many times: this practice is not for sprinters. It is for long-distance runners. So be determined – be determined to make yourself free. Be determined to give your life to your practice. Be determined to give life to the Buddha. This world needs more buddhas, and you are on the assembly line. So get it done.
- John Daido Loori
My first race was a joyous dash across a pockmarked, red clay elementary school playground, from which I was picked for our school relay team. From that relay race sprang three and a half decades of running and racing, culminating in a 100-mile trail race just a few hours from the spot where I had leaned forward, tense and quivering, at that raggedly drawn playground starting line. In January of this year I retired from racing after 35 years. I always wanted to walk away from racing rather than limp away, and it just felt like the right time.
Over the years, I participated in more marathons than I can easily remember, but I never went to Boston. I knew a qualifying time for Boston was pretty much beyond my meager talents, and I never seriously made an attempt to do so. But for the past few decades I have watched in excitement and no little envy as other, faster friends qualified and stood at that famous starting line in Hopkinton. Several of them were running yesterday. All of them are, thankfully, safe. Tragically, many others were not.
Throughout my racing life, I had a somewhat uneasy relationship with the sport. I was competitive, and I still feel it can be helpful to honor the competitor in each of us. Training for races can certainly push us to be the fastest runner we can be, to perform to the very limit of our abilities and beyond. But the darker side of racing is that we can let it define us, view our running only as a string of daily successes or failures based solely on a digital readout.
I came to think of racing as a good life practice simply because it made me more aware of the benefits and pitfalls of my competitive side, which in turn helped me focus more on appreciating the pure act of running. That deeper Tao, where we literally become our legs moving freely over the surface of the earth, the wind whistling in our ears, our breath and heart pounding as one, cannot be exploded from under our feet. It is ours. It is us.
I was reminded yesterday of one of my favorite Zen koans, from the Blue Cliff Record:
Yun Men said, “I don’t ask you about the 15th day, try to say something about after the 15th day.”
Yun Men himself answered for everyone, “Every day is a good day.”
I am grateful for the Boston Marathon, for the spirit of competition, but most of all for the simple ability of running to continually return me to myself. My prayer is that each runner put aside the stopwatch for at least one day and take to the streets or trails for a run of pure gratitude, thankful for the legs that still move underneath them, the heart that still beats within, the breath that pushes all of us forward into the terrible, wonderful unknown, where every day is a good day.
I recently participated in a sesshin (zen silent retreat), during which we periodically practiced kinhin, or walking meditation. As I slowly walked in a circle with the others, I was reminded of how I also had to walk in a circle around our elementary school playground during recess, but for punishment. And when I head out the front door tomorrow in my running shoes, shorts and t-shirt, will I find a new dharma path in the circle I make, or will I feel enslaved by it? The good news is – whether it’s during sesshin, second grade, a short run through the neighborhood, or just taking out the trash – it’s up to me.
In the beginning, you didn’t know where things were going. I want us to maintain that uncertainty. I don’t want to see autopilot. Where I want you to start is, I don’t know. I want a whole lot of I don’t know.
- jazz pianist Jason Moran, practicing with one of his students (from the 3/11/13 New Yorker)
Everest 1953, Michael Conefrey’s account of the first successful attempt to summit Mt. Everest, ends rather soberly. “By the end of 1955 the world had moved on … members of the team were pursuing their different interests inside and outside the climbing world … that June morning where coronation day crowds had heard the news of the first ascent of Everest was fading inexorably into distant memory.” The world may seem to be revolving around your triumphant marathon finish – or shuddering to a halt after that unfortunate and painful twang in your Achilles tendon that ended, after months of hard training, your goal race hopes and dreams. But the currents of time run deep and continuously, and your life is just a single bubble on its vast, flowing surface. Don’t get caught in a whirlpool of your own making. Move with the currents. Move on.
Runners talk a lot about “junk miles,” those miles run without any specific training goal other than to pad the weekly total. I’ve come to a personal understanding that there are no such things as junk miles, so long as (1) you don’t negatively impact yourself or anyone else during the run, (2) you remain present with every step, and (3) your intention is to deeply engage with and enjoy point #2. Just make sure your intention is clear and authentic, and not motivated by that reckless slave of the ego, guilt relief.
I was fitting an older man in a new pair of running shoes the other day, someone who seemed to have lived, as Thoreau put it, a life of quiet desperation. At least, his mood in the store was one of resigned melancholy — a former runner eager to share his regrets and warnings. “I do good to walk now and I would never recommend running to anyone, certainly not anyone over 50,” he said wearily as he slouched in his chair, his eyes scanning the dozens of bright shoes displayed on the wall. “The arthritis, the knee operations and replacements … it’s just not worth it.” He certainly did not realize the person fitting him in a new pair of shoes at that moment was 53 years old, had been running consistently for over 35 years and is still running three to four times a week, had never (knock on wood) had a serious injury of any sort, and finds running very much worth it. I said nothing, but simply took it as another reminder that older people like myself should be careful about making definitive statements on how to live based solely on our own fortunes or misfortunes. As Thoreau also put it, we really have nothing to teach the young — they’ll figure it out for themselves, as well they should. After all, it’s a new world every second.
Even an evildoer may see benefit
As long as the evil
Has yet to mature.
But when the evil has matured,
The evildoer
Will meet with misfortune.
Don’t disregard evil, thinking,
“It won’t come back to me!”
With dripping drops of water
Even a water jug is filled.
Little by little,
A fool is filled with evil.
(The Dhammapada, 119 & 121, third-century BCE. Gil Fronsdal, trans.)
A man strode into the running specialty store where I work, stopped in front of the shoe department, pointed emphatically at his shoes, and loudly and firmly said: “I want THIS exact shoe, in THIS exact size, and in THIS exact color.”
“Sorry sir,” one of my co-workers said, “but they’re no longer making that model of that particular shoe. I can show you the new model, if you’d like.”
The man blinked at my co-worker, his face shifting in seconds from shock to sputtering, bewildered anger. “Don’t make it anymore?” he said, his voice rising. “Why do they keep changing everything?”
I just never know where my next teacher is coming from, which is why I’m trying to pay closer attention these days. What a great koan! Who are these evil overlords “They,” and why do They seem to reap such pleasure in continually spinning our lives into a thousand miniature hells every day? Why can’t anything stay the same?
Once again, someone saw themselves as the unwitting victim of a sinister plot — this time by a shoe company intent on one thing and one thing only: making him the victim, ruining his afternoon. We all give our egos free rein to do this sort of thing every day, and our egos love it, because the last thing our egos want is to be denied or humiliated. If our egos are denied or humiliated, it’s Their fault, and we’re the victim. For some reason, it’s so much easier to star in our own self-directed melodramas than to simply accept circumstances and carry on.
I’ve been listening to a lot of John Cage lately. John Cage is a great teacher of acceptance. His music compositions, often dictated by chance operations (the I Ching was one of his favorite composing tools), make it possible for many of his works to never be played the same way twice. When you’re listening to Cage, you often have no clue what is coming next. It’s as likely to be a moment of silence as a note or a chord, or loud (or soft) thumping or buzzing noises, or — in the case of one of his most famous compositions, 4′ 33″ — nothing but the pianist sitting at the piano for the period of time indicated in the title.
With Cage, everything is music, and once I stop resisting my expectations for melody or anything resembling traditional musical logic — in other words, once I accept the sounds as sounds and just listen — the other sounds of everyday life begin to blend in with Cage’s plinks, plunks and silences, and you realize everything is changing, all of the time, in a thousand different little ways, and it all is making a kind of music together. No music, no “other,” all together.
Listening to Cage has opened me up a little more to acceptance as a life practice and has influenced my running, my sitting and my life in a lot of positive ways. When we stop resisting, when we realize that we’re really exhausting ourselves by trying to stay the same in a constantly morphing universe, it’s easier to accept a twitchy day on the cushion, or a crappy tempo run workout, or a race that didn’t go exactly as planned, or a favorite running shoe that is no longer available — or even much bigger things. Why do They keep changing everything? The real question is, why can’t we see change as the only constant in our lives?
Browsing through our family’s recent vacation pics, my wife and I have decided we’re arrived in senior adolescence. It’s that awkward time of life where you don’t look or feel especialy old, but you’re quite noticeably not young anymore, either. Everything about you is definitely changing — less hair, more wrinkles, etc. — but, at least in photographs, it all still looks just a little half-baked and uncomfortable. We’re older, but we haven’t really smoothly settled into true seniorhood quite yet. Although my wife’s eyes seem to be subtly darkening to an even deeper hazel than they used to be, and they’re lovely. Or, perhaps, now that things are slowing a bit, I just notice them more. And I’m very grateful for that.
Other big changes are apparent as well: I’ve retired from corporate life and am now working part-time as a running shoe specialist for a 40 year-old, family-owned running specialty store. My wife is also retiring early from her 30-year corporate lifestyle (the only company she’s ever worked for) and is already on track for a new, slightly less hectic career with a much smaller company. Both of our daughters are grown and gone; the house is quiet, except for those times our friends or family (including our one year-old granddaughter, our first) come to visit.
So, many changes in the past 12 months. Running and sitting are still my constants, although those have also changed in positive ways. There is more time to run and train properly (we’ll see about that at next weekend’s 50-mile race in Kansas), and more time for my Zen practice. There is more time to read, and I suppose more time to write, at least in theory, although reading and listening to music have occupied more of my time lately. it. I’ve been neck-deep in Plato and Keith Jarrettt’s solo improv piano recordings, and haven’t really been eager to crawl out of that place. Plato is very wise, surprisingly entertaining, and even moving, and Jarrett is a modern-day colossus who affirms the gifts of life and genius through just about every note he plays. We may not see the likes of either of them again, although fortunately Jarrett is still recording.
As I sit and run with all of these changes in my life, most of them positive and beneficial in some way, I feel blessed, sometimes beyond the capacity to truly notice and appreciate. I have to remind myself that each change is not really dramatic or unexpected; they have all happened one step at a time, one breath at a time. I just haven’t always paid attention as I should. But as I do grow out of senior adolescence into true old codgerhood, my prayer is that I will notice and celebrate the changes as they happen in a million microscopic ways, every day, every hour, with every step on the trails and every breath on the mat to help me properly mark the passing of my time.
As the Zen teacher Elihu Genmyo Smith has said, please enjoy your one and only life.
