The run was designed to raise money for missions, and it fit Wish well because he himself was an avid runner. On all the cups and t-shirt designs, his mantra, "Gotta Keep Movin'" made you feel like you could actually accomplish something.
Moving isn't running, isn't sprinting, isn't jogging. Moving is determined progress in an intentional direction.
You may be wondering if this is a post about running (it isn't, but I'll get there), since I've mentioned my running progress more than once recently, though I did, in fact, complete a 5K with my coworkers without walking once:
It was on the coast of Florida, and it felt like I was chewing my oxygen.
My stamina is pretty pathetic generally.
It took two months of training with the Couch to 5K app to be able to do it.
Have I run since?
No.
Running is the worst.
More to the point, though, building stamina through slow determination and a time-oriented goal can be really helpful.
If I had been asked to run a 5K in a week's time, I would have been miserable. Miserable miserable miserable. There would have been shin splints, vomit, walking, stopping, and a lot more complaining. Because I hadn't run in multiple years really. At least not with any consistency.
The app started me slow. Lots of walking, with spurts of running, just short enough that they were doable, but just long enough that they winded you.
By the end, I could do it. I did do it.
Reading is something that has been important to be since long before I could actually read. Words, movement of language, poetry, the poetry of communication, the communication of poetic experience. I love it. I have felt more known by books and language than by other people for most of my life. It's interwoven with my identity.
Then it was tidal waved out of my life.
There comes a point of fear when we realize that what we thought was a temporary phase of complacent mediocrity has become a sturdy "normal".
My diet of philosophy, history, historical fiction, modern poetry, creative nonfiction, and science fiction became replaced by pinterest, twitter, and facebook status updates. Neither my eyes nor my attention span could hold on for much longer than 8 or so seconds.
Scroll scroll scroll.
I missed movement, but I couldn't move.
Depression robs you of all you love.
Worse, it makes you feel as though you weren't robbed but rather have made a choice to abandon.
Perhaps because that's easier than admitting the truth. It's better, you think, to claim you have power, even if in doing so you're communicating that you knowingly want to make the choices that your life is now characterized by.
For me, that's been lethargy, apathy, and mass consumption of the digital world.
Where I had read nearly 60 books in 4 months, the next 4 were only 20, reduced to 8 in the 8-9 months after.
I can't even tell you how many more I started and failed to progress past the first chapter. Didn't even make it through the first chapter, actually.
My pen was just as dusty as my bookshelf. I used to fill pages a day with thoughts and curiosity and updates.
There's not a record of the existence of this past year. I have nothing to say.
Frustration with myself grew.
Grew.
Grew.
Grew.
Grew.
Grew.
Is there a point in frustration that frustration becomes your new identity?
Where your words about your inabilities become who you are?
Yeah.
There is.
I also wasn't being very fair to myself.
The books I was choosing were either far above my "reading level" or so far below that they were children's books that I had already read.
Neither are something to build momentum on.
Then, I don't know, I chose one that looked fun and easy, but it was new and interesting, too.
And I finished it.
In two weeks.
After that, I finished A General Theory of Love, which I had started in October and a bunch more technical. The next day.
Two days after that, I finished a book on the history of JBU, which I had started a year to the day that I had started both the book and my work at JBU.
Then I started a totally new one last Thursday, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. And finished it yesterday.
That's more consistent reading than I have done in more than a year.
My pen has been more active, too, beginning to fill up the final pages of a tiny journal that's taken me more than a year to fill a quarter of.
It's now been a year since I moved back to The States.
This is the first time in that space or even more than I have begun to feel a return out of the ditches of my dead mindedness and back to me. I'm starting to feel ebbing relief in knowing that the part of me I love most isn't lost for good.
I no longer feel defeated. I feel like moving.
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