I feel sometimes like circumstance is trying to control me, trying to put me in a box with other people’s labels. It’s at moments like that when I CTRL ALT DEL to escape – and regain my own control on a run. “…we know not what the day will bring, what course after nightfall/ destiny has written that we must run to the end.” – Pindar
We could riff off Pindar, whose enviable job it was to celebrate athletic achievement, and say: “We will run to the end/ attended by horizons/ the pulsing heart and legs/ extend to.” Yesterday, I noticed an elderly man with his terrier in the wicker basket of his bicycle; kaleidoscopic shadows cast by trees; the wind raising bits of river up into aquatic stars. Afterwards, I could hardly remember what had been troubling me.
I would run sometimes after my shifts as a newspaper editor, at around 4 a.m. in Asia. I’d follow the road that steeply wound round the mountain to the peak, this effort rewarded by the bustling city-by-day now translated into a quiet and distant sea of fairy lights beneath my feet. I felt like an ancient Greek victor standing on the mane of something slain. Running around that peak, I enjoyed every angle of that victory, all of the worry of life deleted in the action of accomplishment.
But those victories can be so quickly washed away by the toughness of circumstance. Life happens, obstacles are thrown our way and we fumble. We lose the control that we had gained. Pindar knows it! “A man can learn, and yet see darkly; blow one way, then another, walking ever on uncertain feet, his mind unfinished”. Learning seems hard enough and in addition to that, Pindar prescribes resolve. But we know this from running. It resets us to be prepared for more to come.
Today, we don’t have poets like Pindar to laud us, but we do have our gear that gains war wounds the more mileage we put it through.
The great thing about having aesthetic running gear is that it doesn’t need to be hidden in a closet. As I sit and work for hours on end at my desk, doubting or overestimating what I can do, I love being able to look at, say, my Orange Mud bottle. It reminds me that if I can’t today, I have been capable before of rebooting in order to CTRL my life again.
The wear on the gear is a reminder of all I’ve escaped – all the challenges that I’ve managed and controlled. I remember by looking at it that if I just take a few steps, I will get closer to a larger end. “The end shines through in the testing of actions where excellence is shown”– Pindar.
Guest post by GG, from Serbia. Thanks Greta!