Freedom

I hit the wall this week.

As a year, 2020 was a sprint that became a marathon. It brought a distinct and unusual experience of time. Of breathless daily life. Of stubborn stamina. In some ways, I found that I could work harder, longer, than many other years in my life. Intermittently, sometimes late at night, I felt that I could withstand, even overcome, previous challenges of personal impatience, fear, and uncertainty. Most days I aspired to dispassionate detachment, a state of caring release, from the horror and strife of a world wracked by pandemic, and, occasionally, during a limited yet noticeable portion of year’s earth cycles, I actually experienced a tiny fraction of the potential that acceptance of impermanence brings. Some weeks felt like the middle miles of my first (and only) actual marathon. I was working but not trying. I was progressing but not moving. I was in a state of flow. I was outside of pace. I was manifesting formless being.

A marathoner’s “wall” is real, however. Anyone who has embarked on extended journeys of the self, either physical or metaphysical, can attest to this. And the wall hurts when it is hit. For just like Chicago, in 1984, when at mile twenty I turned a street corner and suffered the humiliation of abruptly shifting from a human riding the wind to one abjectly empty of all breath and energy, my sense of equanimity and existential poise abandoned me this past week like a rented utility discontinued for my failure to pay the fees. Which perhaps it was, in an odd way. The electricity fueling interpersonal connectivity is not a force that simply flows on its own. It must be sourced. Voltage is required. And resistance can shut it off.

This is not to suggest that I had achieved, even intermittently, some state of personal enlightenment. Heavens no – I am about as enlightened as a rock in the afternoon sun, warm to the touch during cloudless moments but cool and edgy when the external climate is less sustaining. What I had experienced, occasionally, was nothing more than brief moments of acceptance. My emotions, however understandable, were not going to move the pandemic offshore any faster than anger might move a violent storm more quickly along its path. Weeks or months were not of my choosing. A period of patient persistence was. I learned to not question the universe and its Creator about time but to accede – on some days – to a will larger than my own. It felt good to do that. It seemed like a personal achievement to do so.

It was cool and rainy on that November day when I ran the Chicago marathon. I had been training but not for a twenty-six mile race. The decision to register had been spontaneous. It would be interesting, I told myself, to see how far I could go based on my current state of fitness. I had not foreseen that my time, at the half-way mark, would be reasonable. I had not expected that my legs, at the eighteen mile point, would feel fresh. I had not prepared myself for the possibility that, at the turn of twenty miles, a budding star of long distance running, a medical student without a previous history of exceptional athletic performance, was on track to post a qualifying time that would make him automatically eligible for the Boston marathon. It was wildly invigorating and exciting. The runner sped up. He envisioned the final six miles being completed in a speed less than the pace of the first twenty. He embraced the exhilaration of personal discovery and achievement. He – hit – the – proverbial – wall.

Turned a corner. Felt the weight of rain on the arms. Lost the buoyancy of feet atop pavement. Was drained of all motivation and mechanical go-power as if by a colossal cosmic vacuum. He slowed. Walked. Came to a halt.

“Don’t stop now!”

An elderly woman, not quite five feet tall, materialized by my side. She looked up as I were a giant, pointed a crooked finger at my past.

“You’ve come so far.”

The woman’s tone was not sympathetic. Her words were saturated with challenge, a rebuke wrapped within a seemingly encouraging observation. It was almost as if she, on behalf of the universe, had been waiting for me at this rain-drenched corner. The day had turned dreary. My dreams of outstanding performance had evaporated. Somewhere, irretrievably behind me, invisible through the mist that had become my present, lay the ego-saturated glory of unwarranted success. Ahead, unflinchingly, lay the pain-riddled reality of the final six miles. I could not stop. Not after that directive. I could leave my ego on the curb but the rest of me needed to drag itself over another 31,680 feet.

It was an ugly traverse. There was hobbling, shivering, cramping, and faux-running. Still, it happened. Still, I recall the comeuppance I had received from a universe that does not carry remorse for those who lose touch with role and accountability. And still, almost as if she were beside me now, I remember that elderly woman’s face, the bend of her forefinger, and the simplicity of her exhortation.

We do not shed our egos like snake skins, or goose feathers, or old coats of paint wrinkled by the weather. They are part of us, inherently interwoven plot points in our unique identity stories. I could not, regrettably, deposit my over-inflated ego on the curb of that Chicago street in 1984, hoping for it to picked up by the waste disposal trucks later that week, anymore than I can set its contemporary version on the shelf of a year wracked by disruption, by tragedy, by perseverance. Ego must have its place. Where I have control, where my freedom ultimately may best lie, is how I recognize my agent of personal esteem apart from my higher self, how I hear it without heeding its fabrications, how I learn to guide it, as if it were some petulant child, away from danger and harm, distinguishing in the process the difference between becoming and being recognized, between breathing and the fanning of self-reflective airs, between embracing the whole and the warm glow of self that comes from such an embrace.

The path beyond ours wall need not be traveled alone. Our liberty resides strongest in our collective choice to continue. Together, we have indeed come far. As one, we can decide to go farther.

As a people, a species, a global society – we must not stop.