A Complaint and A Plea

For years and miles I was a long-distance runner. I would head out at all times of day: I recall arising at 4:00am when I trained for the New York Marathon, running along Riverside Drive when the only people yet on the streets were prostitutes somewhere and the homeless. I ran in all climates and weather conditions. Once during a torrential rainstorm in the late afternoon a police car passed me and called out over its PA system, “Are you crazy?” Perhaps I was. Perhaps I still am. I have run in almost every state of the United States, even a bit fearfully in Southern states on rural roads. I ran six days every week wherever I happened to be; there were times when I discovered that in my gym bag I had neglected to pack my running shoes but I ran despite this lack uncomfortably but in respectable time in dress shoes. My life in school was a public one, but running was a time when I could be alone. All alone. In my solitude, I could experience a sense of comforting lostness and attain a transcendence. Undisturbed by the commitment to the social that was my daily life as a teacher and then a professor, In the running I could immerse myself in my thoughts and settle my mind and what others call my soul. As Dylan commented, as I ran I thought I could hear “the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea” and “Sometimes I would turn, and sense there was someone there, and at other times it was only me.” I was content in either event. I could only find myself in these miles of lostness.
     Often when I ran I listened to music. Originally I ran with a radio the make of which I cannot remember, but I enjoyed many Sunday morning runs listening to Vin Scelsa’s program Idiot’s Delight on WNEW-FM. Then I owned a series of iPods and I filled them regularly with playlists that I organized almost daily. For one year I listened religiously to Bob Dylan’s album Love and Theft and in another year I listened every day to a Beethoven symphony or concerto. I did not get lost in the music so much as the music let me get lost; much that I wrote began in the solitude of the music and the roads.

     I no longer run long distances; indeed, I don’t run any distances. But I go to spin cycle class twice a week and I attend Yoga classes two to four times each week. And the music no longer allows me to feel my lostness and does not permit a possibility of transcendence. Indeed, in the spin cycle the music seems to punish and I remain tense and assaulted. There is no solitude available. In the yoga classes too often the music distracts me from the concentration on the rhythms of my breath and the focus requisite for the poses. Sometimes I can’t even hear the teacher’s lead over the music volume.

     A good part of my exercise in the past allowed transcendence. This sense probably kept me happily on the road. Now I have become mired in my exercises in emotional discomfort, experienced anger at the harshness and cruelty of the sound of the music, and the incapacity to realize the sense of lostness that accompanied my times on the roads. In running, there seemed to be for me beauty out there that my recent experiences in the gym have made unattainable. But I think this beauty should be possible still if they would only turn down the volume of talk and sound and let me run. Left alone I could make the hour worth my thoughts.