Self-Discovery

"On my solitary run,
I am searching for the meaning within my experiences."

           Beyond the purely physical aspects, there are four elements to the running experience: competition, contemplation, conversation, companionship. All are equally available, but there have been periods in my life when the first two have predominated.
           My running life began with competition. In my 40s, I returned to a sport in which I had excelled during my youth. I sought to repeat those victories in races against my peers. I had entered middle age and was suffering the usual doubts of purpose and self-esteem. I needed a means of self-renewal, even if only a physical one. My body became my self, the race a method of self-discovery.
           To train for these races, I spent hours on the road. And there I found contemplation. I discovered how easy it was to escape from the body into a total encounter with my thoughts---thoughts I had never or rarely been conscious of before. Those training runs became my hour for exploring the meaning of my past, the treasures laid up in my subconscious mind.
           Being a runner comes naturally to me. I am by nature a loner. Like Henry David Thoreau, I am never less lonely than when alone.
           It has always been so for people whose work is done in their minds, for those who fish for ideas in their stream of consciousness. One must be alone to do this. New thought does not come from logic and reason. It comes from inspiration. "I am not sure," wrote British author and lecturer W. Macneile Dixon, "that I would entrust reason even with the arrangement of a bowl of flowers."
           In his book, Solitude: A Return to the Self, Anthony Storr expands on this point. A degree of solitude, according to Storr, is essential for pursuits that call for original thought and the sustained use of the imagination. Storr cites many writers and thinkers who isolated themselves to achieve their creative work. In fact, English historian Edward Gibbon called solitude "The School of Genius."
           I suspect that few, if any, of the solitary runners and walkers who pass by my study window could be classified as geniuses. Yet each one of us has what Ralph Waldo Emerson called our "individual genius," our special way of being in the world. I know of no better way to find my own genius than running with no companion except the rhythm of my breathing.
           And there's more to be found in this solitude: my hour on the road rehumanizes me. It is the hour Swiss psychologist Carl Jung urged his patients to set aside each day for the active imagination---a period of reverie best achieved by walking or movement, in which suppressed areas of the personality can creep to the surface. Jung believed in what he called "individuation," the development of the whole personality. This, he proposes, takes place mainly in solitude.
           My solitary run is also an hour when I can take a step back, get off the treadmill in a way, and examine my life. I am my own philosopher. Dixon comments on this as well: "The values of existence, our joys, our sorrows are not calculated for us by the philosophers, the theologians, and the moralists. In respect to those values we can make our own estimates and do very well with them. They are no better informed than we….No one, however sagacious or eminent, can figure out our personal existence."
           And that is the crux of it. On my solitary run, I am searching for the meaning within my experiences. In that hour devoid of distraction, when the world is on hold, I can focus on the troubles and joys of becoming myself and arrive at a sort of peace. I am the closest I will ever come to who I am, what I believe and what I should do about it. (1989)