Running for Your Life: Every Other Day Since 1977

That was 42 years ago, 1977.

In 1976, I had the misfortune of contracting a serious ailment that I’ve written about before on this blog: a blood clot in my leg that traveled to my lung. Following a long recovery period, I returned to my young man routines a shadow of my former self. My left leg twice the size of my right one.

I had never jogged before. A hockey player in the winter, softball as a kid in the summer, I had never been a runner. But in order to keep my leg circulation in check, I found that if I ran (really not much more than just shuffling along in the beginning), it helped a lot. Pain and swelling went down; for months I had trouble sleeping; after I started running, my sleep improved as did my healing.

Back then, I started running every other day. Every day put too much strain on my left leg, but every other day seemed about right.

That was nine marathons ago … And since then I have run every other day for 42 years, and my leg is still a problem but not at all what it was.

Yep, Running for Your Life. Those can be words to live by.

Next: Running for Your Life: Amity and Prosperity (Not What You Think)

Running for Your Life: Two Days Short of 9/11

Notes on 9/9/19 ….

Let the ‘9’s be wild on this date, two days short of the 18^th anniversary of 9/11.

Never 9/11/01, the shorthand likely to hold for generations.

It is true that the professionalism of words and images is mooted by the glorification of the self.

What is popular in terms of “messaging” exaggerates the individual. Her smarts, her athleticism, her wit, her knowledge.

We undervalue the drivers of ‘soul’: doubt, kindness, empathy, and most egregiously, humility.

What is the phrase that long amused my dad? “I’m so good, it’s hard to be humble.” What’s telling here is an awareness of the elusive objective: humility. That’s the core of the joke.

Instead, today, to be humble is to be weak, to be unheard, to be exploited, jeered at. Like that “SVU” episode about rape trauma. “I’m a nobody,” the victim says, “are you a nobody too?”

In the fantasy of the episode, the rape victim is victorious; we are given to believe that she has a chance to rise out of her special circle of hell.

We are given stories, myths, that make us believe in society; that an essential goodness will prevail if we choose to be essentially good.

Truth is not a factor; but love and faith are.

Next: Running for Your Life: Every Other Day Since 1977

Running for Your Life: On Beauty

FROM “The Book of Time,” an excerpt, in Mary Oliver’s book of poems, “The Leaf and the Cloud”

“Whoever shall be guided so far towards the mysteries of love, by

contemplating beautiful things rightly in due order, is approaching the last

grade. Suddenly he will behold a beauty marvelous in its nature, that very

Beauty, Socrates, for the sake of which all the earlier hardships had been

borne: in the first place, everlasting, and never being born or perishing,

neither increasing nor diminishing; secondly not beautiful here and ugly

there, not beautiful now and ugly then, not beautiful in one direction and

ugly in another direction, not beautiful in one place and ugly in another

place. Again, this beauty will not show itself like a face or hands or any

bodily thing at all, nor as a discourse or a science, nor indeed as residing

in anything, as in a living creature or in earth or heaven or anything else,

but being by itself with itself always in simplicity; while all the beautiful

things elsewhere partake of this beauty in such manner, that when they are

born and perish it becomes neither less nor more and nothing at all

happens to it.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Two Days Short of 9/11

Running for Your Life: TLDNR (On Trying to Keep Up With the Kids These Days)

Climate change is one thing: Arctic fires, disturbingly high nitrous-oxide emissions from permafrost (12 times higher than expected), stable crops will become less nutritious …

When it comes to cultural change, here’s a breath-stopper.

TLDNR is what kids today say when faced with acquiring knowledge:

“Too Long Did Not Read.”

That said, one does find encouraging trends of cultural change in the other direction.

Yesterday (Sept. 16), while moving along the subway platform in Brooklyn, I noticed a man in a hoodie and dark glasses, standing next to a wooden bench. As a daily commuter in Gotham subways over three decades, I tend reasonable precautions, so instead of ignoring strangers’ conversations, I listened closely to what this man was whispering to his suit-and-tie companion:

“Here, you start with turmeric and ginger … “

Next: Running for Your Life: On Beauty

Running for Your Life: What’s Up With the Mid- to Late 60’s?

Okay, call me a Boomer Nostalgist …

And sure our generation is responsible for a host of horrors – the stark failure to do what’s required to slow the impact of climate change being the line leader.

But, give me these words, this from Bob Dylan (in 1965)

‘Now the roving gambler he was very bored

Trying to create a next world war

He found a promoter who nearly feel off the floor

He said, “I never engaged in this kind of thing before

But yes, I think it can be very easily done

We’ll just put some bleachers out in the sun

And have it on Highway 61.’

-- From “Highway 61 Revisited”

These words from Claude Levi-Strauss reflect on the 1969 moonshot

‘and then I am glued to my set, even though it is boring, always the same and lasts a long time. Still, I can’t turn away. In this sad century, in this sad world where we live, with the pressure of population, rapidity of communications, the uniformity of culture, we are closed, like a prison. The Apollo shots open a little window. It is the one experience – vicarious, but we can follow it on TV – the one moment when the prison opens on something other than the world in which we are condemned to live. The moon is the inverse of Columbus’s new world – not an earthly paradise, but a desolate, dead, inhospitable place.’

Which starts a meditation on a world in which “smart” referred to its creative geniuses and deep thinkers and the “smart” of motor vehilces, home appliances and little computers we walk around with and stare at.

Next: Running for Your Life: TLDNR (On Trying to Keep Up With the Kids These Days)

Running for Your Life: The Underappreciated Value of Being Smart

In his remarks during the unveiling of the Triborough Bridge (Now call the RFK Bridge), super-bureaucrat Robert Moses took pains to note writings from Samuel Johnson in delivering a five-star diss to Washington, DC, counterpart, Harold Ickes, in 1936.

Moses referred to the “finest pieces of polite vituperation in the annals of English literature” when alluding to the “help” he received from Ickes …

Here’s what Moses was getting at, as per “The Power Broker” by Robert Caro:

Johnson to Lord Chesterfield, after Chesterfield sought to represent himself as Johnson’s patron seven years after rebuffing the scholar’s request for financial support for his great dictionary project:

“Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when has reached ground, encumbers him with help?

“I hope it is no very cynical asperity to be unwilling that the Publick should consider me as owing that to a patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.”

Next: Running for Your Life: What’s Up With the Late 60’s?