Why run like an elephant?

The run. I wish I had photos of cows
and snorting, steaming horses.

This morning I got up and took another step along the path.

I could put it another way. I could simply say I went for a run.

Each way of describing it reflects different ways of seeing it. Both are handy.

The simplicity of being able to get up and run, and the simplicity of being able to see it as just that - a lovely but nonetheless routine act thousands and thousands of people do every day - is handy because it takes the pressure off it. It lets me take my eyes off the mountain ahead and just go, just take each step, just run. This morning I was running, a little in my own world but enjoying the feel of it and the
beautiful sunshine, when suddenly there was a group of horses and cows running with me in the paddock next to the road. The cows gave up early and circled each other and looked across at me; the horses raced ahead and when they reached the fence turned back to whinny and snort as if they were teasing us, and I just trotted on, "ambling at speed" as I've come to think of it.

The mountain ahead might be literal or metaphorical. I'm training to do two runs, both of which are nearly 1,000kms long. That's a mountain, but neither of those challenges scare me overly. My mountain is about what doing these things, what living this life, is supposed to amount to. All these daily acts, the choice to run or not run, eat one food and not another, spend time in one way and not another: I feel like they are supposed to add up to something. I think it's in our culture to think this way. We are conditioned to think in terms of "making something" of ourselves or "getting somewhere" in our lives. According to the mores of my upbringing (by my culture, not just my parents) there is supposed to be some sort of accumulation of something, and the achievement of some sort of destination.

I'm almost 40, and I guess I'm also feeling the pressure of legacy. What kind of elder would I make? What will I leave behind? Or what would I have left behind if I had died yesterday, or two weeks ago?

Last night we had some friends over for dinner and one friend was talking about the confusion he feels trying to decide whether to keep his house or to sell it and have the freedom to do other things. He framed it as that choice between living for now or living in the knowledge that when he was sixty he would be able to look around and say it was worth it, because he would have this beautiful house with its two gorgeous gum trees standing proud in the yard; he'd be near the surf and have a valuable asset... when he was sixty. In the meantime he would have a mortgage and a never ending list of weekend projects instead of weekends.

It reminded me of a saying I am sure I read once (but can't find now): "There is no path to happiness; there is only the path."

Running is a way of finding happiness in the path. Literally. (Being a bit simple, literal things suit me.) It's a way of just staying with the breath and with each step and with the opportunity presented by every kind of weather and every different track.

But there are mornings when I feel that I've taken another step along the path. Maybe I took the step a few days or weeks or months ago, but it was only this morning that I had the realisation that I'm now somewhere new, half an inch further along the path.

The step was to decide to run like an elephant, and this site is about trying to both work out and explain what that means. It has physical consequences: it is about the technique of running light and smooth, regardless of how big and heavy you are, and being able to run what many people think of as ridiculously long distances, and reach the end healthy and happy. (It might be better to think of that idea as running like a migrating elephant.)

And it has spiritual consequences. I baulk at the word spiritual. All the overtones, history and different meanings attached to it, to me, make it seem to come at me like a creature coming up out of the sea dragging seaweed, barnacles, slime, netting, driftwood and a hundred other pieces of detritus along with it. I could say psychological, or social, or personal consequences, and all of them have their own jetsam attached. But whatever the word, the things that change are how I relate to myself, to others, to the world around me. All of those words catch something of the surface and the depths of those relationships, and running like an elephant is about that, too.

My hope is that there will be some element of legacy in sharing this journey, that it's not purely a selfish thing, so I hope that in the pages of this blog you find some kind of benefit or at least food for thought about the way you go about your day.

Run like an elephant!

Tim