Jogging at 70 has its drawbacks: brittle bones crunching hard pavement, arthritis sandpapering one hip, noting that any of my shorter breaths might be the last one, aching legs squeezed stiff crying for ibuprofen, and, especially, wishing I weren’t such a slowpoke. Didn’t I once resemble a gazelle?
Then I remember that the point is the feeling, not the judgment. I’ve wanted to run again for nearly ten years, but couldn’t find the motivation. Health? Walking’s fine. Looks? Lifting weights is more efficient. Something to do? I’m happy with my current grooves.
By happenstance, I was talking this week to a running coach, but not about his profession. He contacted me to discuss our mutual interest in the Platonic forms, a mysterious set of ideal notions that might underlie our ability to recognize, name, and manipulate things and concepts. Midway through our hour together, I blurted out my yearning to run, and my inability to spur myself into the discipline.
He recommended jogging to music, wearing earphones. Good idea, but not for me. I reserve music listening to my car, my stationary bike, and my office, undisturbed by a secondary interest that might interfere. In passing, though, my new friend mentioned that he runs for the altered state it generates.
Altered states, I thought. Now that’s something I could get behind. In all my years as a long-distance runner, from age 12 to my mid-50s, I had cataloged and described a number of ways that the miles on any day could bring on peculiarly relaxing and vibrant sensations. The jangliness of the first steps, the sudden smoothness at 15 minutes, when my body switched from burning sugar to fat, the release of relaxants at mile nine or 10, flooding in the runner’s high, the wild distortions from mile 20 on as my brain lost some censors and reliability. I regularly noted the changes in consciousness as I ran, marked them off and then continued with whatever I was thinking about, my stream of consciousness or work on a mental puzzle. The altered state took second place as a temporary distraction, a sideshow.
What if it became my purpose in running?
I tell my coaching clients, who come to me with inner-critic complaints, that maybe their purpose isn’t the responsibilities of life, all the factoring and preparing, but the simple fascinations. What if intimacy and curiosity were your purpose, your entry into love, and duty your distraction, your departure into distrust?
One of my duties is to take care of my body, another to reinforce pleasure, another to present as a mature, steadfast adult. Health, happiness, and wisdom. Only through discipline and striving will I reach my Platonic form of myself. It’s off in the future, but I’ll get it. That’s the common model. Dutifulness harangues far more than it delights, even if its object can be hedonistic.
Fascination with what is already evident isn’t like that. It’s willy-nilly, spontaneous and innocent, unjudged and unjudging.
On my run today, I considered Noam Chomsky’s break with most linguists who assume that language – the grammatical statements that accompany all experiences – is meant for communication and species improvement. To most linguists, the uniquely human acquisition of language more than 300,000 years ago is just another mutation that worked out well. Like a morphological adaption, they say, self-reflection gives our species an edge in adding individuals and spreading into more spaces. You probably think that too. Language – shared reason – gives us special strategies to dominate other species and survive in unwelcome environments. But Chomsky notes the obvious – that most of our thoughts are fragments that communicate nothing to anyone else, and that a lot of my – or your – full sentences racing along in the mind simply narrate what you and I are going through. My mind is entertainment mostly, isn’t it?
Running long distance is already a little willy-nilly. If it’s through woods, the random order of nature surrounds me, green and brambly and without preference for one tree over another, or a dark glade over a streamside. If I’m plodding along streets, the spectacular ordinariness of human invention grabs my attention: shiny new cars, crowned pavement that allows the rain to run off into storm sewers secretly housing families of racoons, front yards and fences and gates and bungalows housing strangers next to each other, contrary to the rules of the species. Nature and human invention are equally dizzying, entertaining without being consequential, aren’t they? All I have to do is look.
What if fascination is the point? The first story of Genesis is fascination: “It was good.” The second story adds judgment: “They were bad.” Whoever came up with the Adam and Eve story probably lived about 10,000 years ago, at the turn of humanity from its long tribal history as hunters and gatherers to its dooming decision to store food in containers. The author noticed how uneasy civilized life played out compared to what preceded it and still existed nearby. Civilized life emerged safer, yes. Happier, no. Living next door to strangers – a hallmark of civilization – turns us suspicious, paranoid even, and requires the artificial boundaries of right vs. wrong and good vs. bad, what’s meant in the story by the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” We didn’t need good/bad right/wrong in our 300,000 years in small tribal groups without hierarchy, private property, or distrust of the 200 or fewer people we spent almost all of our time with.
Duty – playing by the rules of civilization – is a drag. We sulk as sullen children being told to give up our willy-nilly curiosity. Oddly, the actions required by duty are usually fun. Tasks are fun. In sixth grade, I first noticed how weird it was that every day I judiciously avoided doing my homework, protecting my freedom by considering the interruption of the responsibility of homework to be onerous, and then, later in my room, 10 minutes into my math problems or reading assignment I was happy and absorbed in the routine exercises, the discovery of new lands on paper. I’m still like that. I’ll put off the writing I want to do, simply because I have required it of myself. Being compelled to do tasks is the only problem I have with them. Once I start in, the absorption and discovery take over. There’s no such thing as soul-crushing work if I get a kick out of hours and hours of weeding my garden.
One altered state appeared immediately today as I set out on my run: an abundance of wind pushed at my skin, adding cold where there was moisture, flattening anything stray – hairs, ears, lips, belly flab, shoving its way here and there simultaneously. In this part of the Bay Area winds can kick up at any time. In my old running days I had pushed through headwinds thousands of times, thinking them spoilers, nuisances, bedevilers. But today, by settling into noticing the wind effect, staying with it rather than cataloging it or judging its consequence, it seemed to break into many parts. Do I ever feel the full force of a wind, or is it picked out piecemeal, here and there on my body, discrete sensations that switch out so rapidly they feign a body-shaped plane, pretend coincidence, leaving an illusion of a perimeter of flesh, hair and cloth? How had I never felt or perceived or named that before? What if each of my gazillion nerve endings that I call the sense of touch has its own moment with me, firing in nanosecond sequences? Are they mostly censored or are they mostly collected into clumps that then project a generalized feeling that is actually made of tons of little, non-concurrent pinprick bristlings at the wind?
As the cinder and gravel path kicked under me, my senses and mind soon wandered into Brownian motion and the clumping that allows randomness to force up particles, and their analogs waves and lightbeams and energy. Is it also an altered state to imagine strange realms? Some of my favorite thought experiments conjure deterministic universes with peculiar conditions, the movie screen of the panorama flattening into two dimensional colors without substance, or the zoom lens into a dusky glen that fills with shadows and carved shapes, or the picking out of a distant calla lily that takes on all meaning and leaves all else a blurry horizon. Altered states all. If I yearn to be released from the constraints of good/bad right/wrong, the repressions of civilization, the paranoia from living among strangers, aren’t these altered states plausible safety nets?
Every faith condition comes with its own safety net, a deterministic universe that can live side by side with civilization’s rules and hierarchies. Brahman absorption. Buddhist dependent arising. Christian heaven. Taoist Tao. True nature. Consciousness with a capital C. Nirvana. They’re all altered states. Joining Allah. Standing atop the mountain. Plato’s realm of forms, leading to The Good.
Now I have engineered a new coalescing of thoughts, into an expanded view of altered states, one that can drive my running for weeks, maybe months or years. Exploring my skin and sense of touch, the fluidity of my narrated thoughts, the natural and invented worlds around me. All because the term “altered states” coalesced into a running coach’s vocabulary, and got mentioned to me in a moment of divine guidance.
Oh so perfect- yes I only run for the altered states and to run in the Homeboy Industries 5K benefit! Bravo Neal