Notes from the running path

Diary entries from November, thoughts on feeling alive

The conditions

If you get out early enough, there’s no one on the path. It’s just you and the trees and a reservoir of water and the expanse of road that surrounds it.

The water looks like glass when the air is still and on these quiet days, I run without music because the pattern of my breathing is rhythmic enough to anchor me into my body — bring me home if I’ve been spinning too far out.

When it’s later and lots of people are out, or when the airs not still so the water looks more like it’s wrestling with its own unrest, the music helps because it’s like a distraction from the distraction, or it’s the motivation I need to push through the first strides.

And when I really tune in, I’ll often find clues in the lyrics of songs I know and don’t know, like and dislike pointing me towards unnamed values, desires, shapeshifting ideas. The unrest that bubbles in me.

Staying alive to the world

The reason human connection feels so good is because it’s a risk. You take the risk of showing yourself to someone else, of exposing some part of you that is soft or perhaps not yet fully formed and when you are received tenderly, the resulting feeling is complete aliveness.

Like it puts everything in perspective, you remember why connection is at the center of what makes life worth living. Breaking bread or having a drink or seeing a movie is just the vessel that gets you back to the truth. It’s not more than that. I forget sometimes. And when I get home from any event and I’m feeling numb or drained or frustratingly dull, I realize now it’s probably because connection never took place.

To be clear, you don’t have to be the one exposing yourself to achieve this complete aliveness. You can just as similarly, perhaps even more powerfully, be the tender receiver.

But what a responsibility it is. To show up in a promise you’ll make to yourself that when you’re given access to the vulnerable parts of another, you will handle them with care. You will commit yourself to seeing them. To your faith in the inherent goodness of the other.

I choose to believe we’re good. I think anyone who has been able to tap into their own unhinged benevolence understands that they’re not more special than any of the rest of us. That the inherency of this quality, the goodness, lives within us all.

But to see it everywhere else, you have to know it’s in you too. You have to recognize that you’re not good because of x, y, z. It’s just how you came here — how we all did.

Believing in good is an easier way to live. But it’s also the more difficult path because it makes it harder to blame anyone else for your own dissatisfaction, unhappiness or for your own confusion. Blame gives you permission to stay where you are, to not change anything be it a viewpoint, behavior or a feeling.

It keeps me in denial of the truth. Separate from real self-awareness. And sometimes that can feel easier than going inward, but in the end, it’s never actually the easier thing because it disconnects you from reality. And when you’re not connected to what is here, you are, in a way, out of integrity (wholeness). The wires get crossed, you become like that reservoir of waving water, unsure of what causes the unrest.

So you have to start peeling back and back until you get to the core. It’s so sensitive there at the core. So tender to the touch. But once you work up the courage to touch it for real, it’s so liberating too. You realize that all this time, you’ve been hiding behind your defenses: the criticism, cynicism, skepticism, blame, thinking it would help you stay in place when in fact you’ve been working harder than ever because you’ve been running and running and running and running

further away from yourself.

I used to be so afraid to touch the core, I thought it would make me fall apart. I worried I’d never be able to put myself back together but in fact touching it did just the opposite. It became a North Star to work my way back towards every time I feel like I’m getting lost.

Faithlessness is on the opposite end of spiritual aliveness

There are different kinds of aliveness. There is creative aliveness, spiritual aliveness, emotional aliveness, psychic aliveness — I’d argue that they’re all related, that the overtaking sensation when you feel any strain is the same, but their opposite parts are different.

On the other side of spiritual aliveness, for example, there is faithlessness. A life without faith is dark. It’s taxes and root canals, bureaucratic misunderstanding. I think this is why I have been so repelled by so much of the political discourse of the last decade. It feels to me like more effectively than anything, it trivializes a pursuit of faith, breaking the world down and thus disconnecting its plates into finite parts — good and bad, moral and evil.

But believing that we can be so straightforwardly one or the other diminishes both the grim and the glory of a real human experience in its murky shades of teal and grey and platypus purple.

It necessitates a world of dualism.

We don’t have to live a dualistic reality.

It’s incompatible with the simple truth that embedded within each of us is the sheer force of a will to love, to be loved, to make something of ourselves. How we engage with that will differ and sometimes it is deeply misguided, buried so deep underground it seems like it’s not there. But for sure there’s a spark in us all.

I choose to believe that.

Anti-flatness

On the other side of creative aliveness, there is flatness. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, about what happens when our worlds go flat. The dynamism we lose, the emotional urges we suppress, the original impulses we become too afraid to nurture.

On the running path recently, a song came on. It was by Eminem. His music is not my choice for momentum — it may not be my choice at all, but you cannot deny how alive it is.

How much of himself — the odd and radioactive sensations that pulse through his body — are poured into his music. It takes such profound vulnerability and courage to give yourself to your craft in this way. To access the truest and weirdest, most original parts of yourself and unleash them onto the world. And then to defend them when they’re knocked over?

That sticking up for yourself, that resilient fight for the weird — it’s what gets me through the end of the run.

Ironically, sometimes it’s Taylor Swift who delivers the same jolt.

Have you ever listened to her lyrics? I mean really listened. Under the poppy beat and her voice full of so much levity, there is a tiger ready to pounce. Or maybe it’s a lion roaring. When she came on while I was on the path earlier, my stride got faster, more fluid. I could feel the “fuck you” rinsing off of her person in that palatable way she does not surrender to a third party opinion of her.

How novel a concept, to stay with yourself. To refuse to let a false label win, no matter how seductive, well-crafted, popularly received it becomes. You have the last word on who you are.

The vulnerability implicit in a child’s gaze

You know what kids do is they keep you honest.

The first time I realized this was soon after Madeline and Laura were born over 6 years ago but I didn’t have words to put to the sensation, which felt like a newfangled possession of responsibility and simultaneous liberation.

In the days that are stretching further out since Joelle arrived in August, as her proximity to God grows further distant and she becomes a baby, I’m beginning to understand what it means.

My kids keep me honest because when they look at me, I understand the depth of how my worldview correlates completely to their own. I see the vulnerability of their gazes. The way that without me, they’re not sure what they are. Who they are. They’re not even sure if they are. They look to me to understand what is.

And when I can’t look at myself for this reason or that, I can’t look at them either.

But how could I compromise such vulnerability? I never want to have to look away from their gaze.

Thank god for that gaze,

for them

for me

It keeps us alive.

Happy thanksgiving,

Leandra