There is a certain victory in running. Though it’s not so much just in running as it is in being physically active, engaged, capable. For me, though, that victory shows itself specifically through running, and the opposition to those not. It’s not a position of compassion or empathy, but on the surface level, there is something very poignant and immediate about running down the street past nameless others, many in visible states of either physical or emotional struggle. In the area I live, it’s not always manifested as morbid obesity, as the usual narrative goes, but rather bodies frail and thin, bones visible and protruding from, most likely, a drug-induced distraction from eating. The sadness and dejection on their faces conveys the same struggles of their decaying bodies.
There is a personal victory in juxtaposition, of being able to run by these individuals with self-created capability. And yet, it’s not as basic as “putting in the work” versus a life that didn’t involve physical struggle, but instead the emotional foundation that leads one to see value in creating a life worth living. Before any physical degeneration takes place, an emotional one usually precedes.
For me, then, the victory is not just in the physical act of running, of being capable despite the odds, but that all the experiences I created for myself leading up to this moment in my life enables that physical capability. Running is just the physical manifestation, the physical expression of my internal emotional state, and my internal emotional state has been crafted through a lifetime of reasoning, consideration, and education. There is a victory in that.
I often weighed the values of the cerebral pursuits against the values of the physical pursuits, as if they were two separate entities able to coincide without ever crossing paths. One could, theoretically, engage fully in an educational or philosophical practice at the neglect of the body and reach a peak quality of life. Similarly, one could devote themselves to a practice of honing their complete physical selves, while paying no attention to intellectual considerations, and equally thrive. As my life circumstances tended to shift between these two seemingly separated dynamics, I definitely reaped the benefits of concentrating on one or the other, but as the excesses of each fell away, the interplay between the two became wholly apparent.
Specifically, when cancer came crashing in, the strengths of both were challenged beyond anything I had encountered prior. When I found myself facing down mortality in a truly immediate sense, the fear that seems to consume most wasn’t present, stifled by the reasoning and perspective I had developed over years and years of reading about evolution, religion, lives of quality, and the subsequent confidence that develops through an understanding of our world of complexity. The intellectual work I had put in faced what some would see as the ultimate test, but that confidence allowed me to absorb the experience and move through it with relative ease. There was, then, the physical obstacles of a body wasting away through disease and treatment, yet, the patterns of physical work and routine I had established leading into the surgeries enabled me to reverse the degeneration, get stronger and stronger, build back the lost capability, and enact the lessons of physical resiliency I had learned along all those countless miles.
The value of those coupled dynamics, however, is not simply in moving through this experience of cancer with perspective and relative ease, but rather in moving through life itself with perspective and quality. There is a certain victory in knowing that with or without the test of threatened mortality, the quality of a complete life, developed through both the intellectual and physical pursuits is experienced on a daily basis, against the constant reminders by the nameless others who visibly suffer in physical degeneration and, likely, emotional desperation. Or those physically destroyed individuals laughing away their abbreviated lives, alongside the physically primed, but internally depressed beings lost to the difficulty of our confusing civilized complexities.
There is a certain victory in, not necessarily “health”, but capability, of having the ability to navigate the physical stresses of our world, and being able to do so through the emotional and intellectual stability that allows us to persevere and find value and comfort in so much difficulty that is not of our own making. The greatest victory, however, is knowing the interplay between the two create a unique peak of quality that can’t be met through either alone. There is a specific value that can hardly be described, but really only experienced, when the psychological and physical mechanisms are working in concert, unseparated, as one. Others find that interplay by their own interests, but I’ve always experienced it through the act of running.
That is a victory, daily, that transcends all the absurdities of our lives. No matter how impossibly we struggle against economic schemes, structures of domination, the complexities of civilization….the discovery of a self-created, repeatable act of physical and intellectual interplay is our greatest victory over all the excessive, daily facades.
Run Vegan 