Running for Your Life: Claim Space

So you want to live in Park Slope department:

A principal mating ritual in Park Slope winter: Adult female wearing the bright orange glow-in-the-dark PARK SLOPE FOOD CO-OP traffic vest as an ass-hugging skirt.

Prospectors, land. Natives, land too. In the case of this blog, mental geography. How on recent mild weather runs what I feel inside is my first run as a New York City resident, not a visitor, there had been plenty of those. But twenty-five years ago on a run around the reservoir at Central Park during a peculiar swath of Indian summer weather so much like today (Dec. 22) when I ran for an hour around Green-Wood Cemetery that it brought the earlier run flooding back to mind, and not just as a passive memory but as an active reality, as real as anything that is this run I lay claim to that person who was in that moment in December 1988. We are one I think as I run because I am always letting the surroundings I see and feel dictate the mental terrain. It is what I mean about claiming space. It is what we have done in the West. Whether as white invaders (prospectors and settlers) or native activists seeking land stolen in treaties or long-distance runners laying claim to mental space, to geography in the mind.

In this spirit, consider this as a new year’s resolution. When next you hear the phrase, mental loss, find a way to change the conversation. There is a power in words. I have a dream that one day when we Google the phrase “mental gain” it will appear as often as “mental loss.” Here is one of the lessons I learned from the brilliant short story writer DW Wilson, whose recent collection, “Once You Break A Knuckle,” http://bit.ly/19KIfL7 includes the story “The Persistence.” In it is the life lesson, Persistence Beats Resistance. And how. There are ways to fire the brain through natural means so that mental gain can be a reality. Or so I believe, and man, there is a world of power in that.

Best of the season, everyone!

Next: Running for Your Life: The Next Race