Slowly, slowly

About five days a week now, I go running. I put on the shorts, a T-shirt, the socks and shoes, and either on the treadmill at the health club or on the trail that follows the Rillito River, I move foot by foot and stride by stride.

I am very slow. In high school, when I ran on the track team, I could cover half a mile in a little over two minutes. I was no star, but I could move. These days, it takes me nine or ten minutes to run a mile, about five minutes for every half mile. As I continue to run, I'll probably get faster, but I know I'll never match my speed from twenty-five years ago.

I thought I would mind more than I do. I thought I would long for my old speed. I can remember training runs from those days. I don't remember the races as well, but I recall glimpses of them too.
The sensation of speed, the feel of the air moving past, of the ground passing beneath my feet, has woven itself into the memory of my muscles. But the absence of longing surprises me.

I prefer being slow. While my body groans into shape, I have enjoyed the aches, the sense of slogging through sand, the morning stiffness when I climb from my bed.

I'm no masochist or martyr. I don't seek pain for its own sake. But this tree-like change in my body, this creeping growth, suits me. To live my life incrementally, that's what I want. No more leaps and bounds. If and when I get to some faster, sleeker fellow, I'd like to have had the chance for him to grow on me. I'd like to get to know him, muscle by muscle and breath by breath.

It will be months before a new me arrives, maybe years. I'm taking the time to get ready for him they way you get ready for a new baby or write a novel or save for the house you've always wanted or correspond with a friend who lives far away but whom you hope to meet one day.

Living, working, loving slowly. Running, slowly. Each step. Each day.

This way, bit by bit, I get to arrive all the time, every day a short journey familiar and new.

Breathing in and out

I'm sitting at my desk during my lunch break, in an office on the west side of the Santa Catalina Mountains, the wind whipping the trees around outside my window. I've alays liked the wind: the sound of it rushing over the land, the feel of it pushing and pulling me when I walk outside, the smells of plants and dust and sometimes rain that it stirs into my nostrils and my lungs.

Nothing soothes me more than the sound of the house shuddering and groaning in the night as the wind buffets and cuffs it. Or the frantic jingle of a windchime dancing crazily as if to keep up with the wind's music. For reasons I can't explain, the sound of the motion makes me feel more at peace.

I've been running again in the time since I've last written here. It's something of a miracle. At age 44, I had reached the conclusion that my knees would not longer tolerate the pounding that goes along with hauling 200 plus pounds of weight over a roadway or park path. I had pretty much given up on being able to run again, even casually, when I decided to exercise more regularly. So I started with walking--the swinging-your-arms power walking that I had always made fun on when I was younger. It felt surprisingly good to be in motion again, to feel my body's muscles working.

Then my wife and I got a trial membership at a health club nearby, and when I stepped on the treadmill, I moved from the walk into a slow jog. A feeling like memory took hold of me. It hadn't the specificity of normal memory, of incidences or events. And it wasn't as defined as an emotion.

But a sensation that felt familiar enveloped me. In the past month and a half, I've awakened again to my body, not just the pleasure of it but the strength and power and fatigue and completeness of it pushing itself into motion. I've felt it growing stronger.

I don't know what to make of it except to say that I've tapped back into myself. At the same time, I've been reading Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, enjoying the simplicity of his language and his thought, and the depth of that simplicity. They feel connected to me, the running and the reading. Essential. Unembellished. Without expectation.

And now they've brought me back to the writing too. I find myself here again, putting word after word. Just to do it and see what happens, just for the sensation of the sound of my fingers on the keyboard, the letters unscrolling on the screen, the feel of my wrists suspended and my hands in motion.

The wind does what it does, without concern or desire or ambition. It moves; it breathes, invisible. I feel it filling me.