To understand why we run, that is the hardest and easiest
question. Running refines us. It allows us to refocus and reprioritize, leaving
just enough room for what really counts. Life is a series of paradoxes. To find
ourselves, we get lost. To gain, we lose. To know the light, we plunge into the
dark. The meeting of two worlds. A double exposure. Oddly compliant and
timorous. Our time does not run in a circle, it runs ahead in a straight line.
We have times of connectedness and times of parallel lives. Sometimes a little
escape offers the perspective we need to see.
This morning, I laced up my running shoes
and went for an early pre-dawn run through Berlin. Enveloped by the silence of
the night and the mist of a new day, I do my own little speed workout. Not a
soul out, this time is mine, and mine alone, sixty stolen minutes in the dark. Chasing
down Berlin’s rose line, the Straße des 17. Juli, past Brandenburger Tor and
Charlottenburger Tor, my feet take me 12 miles down, from east Berlin to west Berlin
at a new personal-record setting pace.
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| Brandenburger Tor. Berlin, Germany. |
When was the last time we gave our all? When did we pull so
hard for a dream that we got red-faced and our feet hurt from our simple and adamant
refusal to let it slide?
With so many time constraints, rules, limits and routines in the hectic pace of our lives, many of us need a another place where we can set our own pace, even if it just for six miles.
With so many time constraints, rules, limits and routines in the hectic pace of our lives, many of us need a another place where we can set our own pace, even if it just for six miles.
