I Hear Voices When I Run

Part of the challenge of effective communication is in deciding the status of the voices in the conversation. And I'm talking only about communication with myself!

Now that I can actually run for more than 40 minutes at a time, it's a bit of a lark to note how quickly into a run the voice sharing some version of "I am tired," or  "I am sore," or "I haven't felt that pain in my foot before," or "Maybe, let's just walk today" makes itself heard.  Sometimes it's about 17 seconds in, sometimes the voice morphs its message and haunts me for up to 10 minutes. 

What is that voice? Where does the laziness come from and how did it develop its rhetorical skills? Given that we agree that keeping running is a worthwhile goal, how should that voice counselling the alternative be dealt with? Persuaded? Ignored? Crushed? 

When I do push through and quiet that voice, what happened to it? Was it convinced or shamed or did it simply retreat and gather its arguments for next time? 

And why can I count on a next time?

My tentative conclusion is that running touches off a bit of a civil war inside me, a civil war that another part of me is able to watch and draw conclusions from. 

Today, I ran from downtown into the river valley and along the water and over the LRT bridge. When I climbed back up the river bank and walked back to the YMCA,  I heard the demolition crews undoing the old Bank of Montreal building on the corner of Jasper Ave. and 101St. And the scene struck me in a new way. 

The building's concrete frame, seemingly so solid, was being pulverized into rubble. So that something new could be built. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hello!

Image
The potential socialness of a bicycle is built right into its roofless and windshieldless and doorless frame. It is easy to say hello on a bicycle. Like this morning. These sidewalkers nodded to me in unison at the exact instant I nodded to them. I said hello to the jogger, and he waved back. Hi, I said, to the dog walkers and the dog, and they nodded a greeting back. Both joggers smiled and said hello as our lives passed. I said hello to the squirrel. I said hello to the woman walking with poles and she returned the hello. The jogger looked over and I said hello as she said hello. I said hello to this fellow egg picker upper and we talked for a couple of minutes. Her bicycle comes out April 1. She is excited. Hello, I said. Hi, she said. I said hello to the  man on the other end of this leash and he said he and his dog were enjoying the beautiful morning. I said hello to this woman and she said hello, and we laughed ab
Read more

:)

Image
One of the joys and dangers of studying in the MACT program is that you start to feel scared enough to feel confident enough to fool around and try simple new things with technology. The danger is that you're not good enough not to spend most of your time fiddling around doing those things. And, so, this morning I am proud to announce that, taken by the hand, I have managed to embed html vimeo code into my blog. Please, no applause. This is not much, I know. Your basic 8 year old can do more. Asleep. But it is a minor accomplishment for me, because of me. And how I get in the way with my pre-wired reaction that new things won't work. The effect of that kind of thinking (or that lack of thinking) is that I transform the machine in front of me into an antagonistic force working to undo me. But it does remind me of me when I attribute malevolence to the skies when they conspire to bring rain on a morning of golf! Either way, that's bad storytelling. On another leve
Read more

On the way to and from Coffee Outside

Image
I have wondered about the the flight to artifice when natural beauty is encountered. Standing in front of a mountain vista, I will routinely offer some version of, wow, it looks like a painting! Or like a postcard. Or that is just out of a movie! This morning as I pedalled in the MacKinnon Ravine the April snow felt etched onto the limbs of the trees. I have often felt dissatisfied with this transposing of the beauty out there into the key of human making.  But, maybe, painting and photography and engraving and the rest of the human arts are as natural to us, as lovely, as nature itself. Or, maybe, so entwined that it is hard to tell nature and art apart. My bicycle has certainly transported me to feelings of freedom I would not have achieved were it not a piece of technology.  Who are we, really?                                                                           At the turn at the bottom of the ravine, a plastic orange fence encircles a soggy sink
Read more