*traversing Brooklyn on foot*
Yesterday evening I jogged without pause for an entire mile.
All day I curled into myself, hid in corners, wandered aimlessly from task to contrived task, asked over and over again in silence why I keep telling myself blindly to stay alive, stay alive, keep going, stay alive. Didn't eat. Guzzled cup after cup of coffee, black (and let me tell you, there is no better way to nurse a vile mood than by subsisting on coffee in all of its bitter strength). Made up my mind at last to quit tormenting my body and went to eat dinner. Cleared away the dishes and the leftovers from the meal. Went to the Keurig machine to brew another cup of coffee.
Stopped.
Told myself, No, you've already had your allotted amount of coffee for the day. Go run, and if you still need it when you come back you can have it.
So I turned off the Keurig dispenser and donned shorts and Skechers, grabbed the Rabbit and a pair of earbuds, and went out into the night.
And I jogged that mile without stopping, not even once.
The full circuit around the rural block is two and a quarter miles altogether. Alternating walking and running for the duration of the distance has served sporadically as my workout for the past several weeks, a routine both exhausting and refreshing, not to mention conducive to the completion of an idea first conceived in June: to by the beginning of autumn be able to run the entire loop.
It is, perhaps, an odd agenda to set with the heat of the summer months and all its inflicted lethargy arrived in full force. If the reasons driving the goal centered around weight loss and muscular toning, there would be dozens of methods by which to achieve those ends, but those aren't what I'm chasing with one foot pounding after the other on a now-familiar stretch of macadam. To be honest, I'm not running for my body, not really. Step after step, heaving breaths coming fast against each other, pain convulsing the space just below my right lung—I'm running for my life.
Because there are times—far too many—when I go to bed asking myself if the coming day is worth the trouble of waking for it, and far too many times that morning and an awkward faceplant in a great invisible puddle of despair run parallel. I'm not all that good at the whole keep-on-keeping-on thing, not without a reason.
Because I cannot recall one instance in the past two years when I did not feel like an abject failure, groomed and doomed from the start to make nothing but a faltering wreck of my own life and perhaps the lives of a few others.
Because that two-and-a-quarter mile loop is not some vague and fluctuating end to be attained, like fluency in a language or writing well or professional-level piano playing, all of which seem more or less impossible depending upon the mood of the day.
If there is one thing that I am, it is uncertain. Halting. Terrified of anything I haven't unquestionably mastered—which makes it all the more horrific to face the fact that there is hardly a skill I have already obtained, but merely a vast list of things to in the future be developed and pursued.
I, who catalogue my worth as a person by goals successfully accomplished and deeds already done, have a track record of procrastination and inadequacy and failure stretched long behind me. Given the seemingly endless number of bad habits that need to be unlearned and replaced, let alone the ambiguity making of my once pin-pointed aspirations a dizzying kaleidoscopic array of options and obstacles and fears, the record is not likely to see any drastic adjustment in the near months (even years) of the future.
But for running.
Talk about the ideal short-term, concrete goal...
Even so, it is far more than the mere satisfaction of putting something definable behind me.
Every time I strike out on pavement and propel myself best foot-both feet forward, I remember that I'm wrong about the invariable bleakness of the future; about nothing but greater failure—or worse, mediocrity—waiting ahead; and most of all, about whether I can open my eyes the following morning and roll out of bed to work through the day. Every time I stagger back into the house sweat-slicked and trembling from exertion, I realise again that the pact with myself to overcome somehow all that weight of my own making is not a rare fantasy entertained when I am feeling particularly mellow but a tangible, real goal that might not look like what I presently imagine it to be but definitely can be achieved.
I remember that I can live.
That makes a two-and-a-quarter-mile stretch of pavement all that much more than the measurement of the distance of a mere run.
*title quote attribution: Lemony Snicket
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