Run For Your Depth

What is all our running for?  The age old question re-visited.  We have so many types of runners... so many different reasons for running.  Granted, it is not important for any of us to say what distance running "must be" for anyone, but it broadens me to stretch myself for the reasons which I myself run.  To regularly re-break the threshold of age old understanding of humanities pursuit of running long distances.  Indeed we are clearly spiritual at the core of our design; cognitive & bright of intellect (most of us!); and we are deeply nomadic in our physical needs and make-up.

This having been said there is a wonderful quote from WILD, An Elemental Journey (Jay Griffiths).  She says, "Nomadism is like an original fire in our wild minds; we stole it from the gods, and we made it into our own, leaping to new places, quickening to motion, curious and light as flame.  The keen urge has never left us to take a flitting tent and fling it under the stars, then swing on at dawn, on an elemental journey.  That is how to burn most brightly.  That is how to catch like wildfire." I cannot imagine any holistic distance runner NOT celebrating the spirit of what she writes!

I decided to write this post after some time off because of the picture of the week to the left... LOVE.  After another couple thousand miles of running, it continues to occur to me that the basis for the modern distance runner; who continues in their practice for holistic development; seems to be for greater depth of life.  A greater spiritual, intellectual and physical depth will give us the greatest package of love we could have to share.  Sharing this "package" is what life is all about.  

Sure, the origins of distance running are surrounded in basic and utilitarian need.  However, in modernity we do not need to run for our sustenance physically... but how we DO need to run for our connection to our humanity!!  We run for our depth!  All the distance runners I have enjoyed reading, or had the opportunity to speak with, have a broadening capacity for depth and love and respect of humanity.  A capacity to understand suffering and joy.  This reality is an amazing thing!

What makes the image to the right so rich is because it indicated the core of what is most important to us... LOVE.  Probably love which is bigger than our own views of it... for this mother is a refugee.  She does not know where she is from or where she is going; she does not know where today's food for her child will come from or if she will have food today at all; she has no documentation of identity, no possessions to speak of, no job or source of income and she has no concept of our modern world.  She is in the lost world... BUT she does have love.  Probably greater love than we have understood.  Look closely at her now. 

Of the many reasons I run... I run for my depth.  Do you?  Cheers!