I am not a runner

I’ve borrowed this title from my friend Lara Robinson and her Saturday Morning Zen blog. Lara recently wrote about not feeling like a runner. It got me to thinking … and I want to take it in a different direction.

In Lara’s blog she questions her status as a runner. She hasn’t run much in several months and voices the loss she feels.

I can relate to this feeling. At one point I was cycling five or six times a week with long rides on the weekends. I considered myself a cyclist. Then I went over the handlebars smashing my face, I don’t recommend this maneuver by the way. The recovery from the facial injuries and brain injuries took two years and for perhaps a year of that, I did very little exercise. My body wouldn’t let me, and thankfully I listened. I felt the loss of my identity as an athlete, as a cyclist. It was even more than that, I slept a lot and in general didn’t have much energy. I hardly went out with friends, I wasn’t very productive at work or at home. My identities as a productive person, as a friend, as a social being – and many more – were challenged over and over.

I didn’t know who I was or how to describe myself. My definition of who I was was dependent on what I did.

We all feel this and we feel this as loss because we hang our confidence and our identity on words and ideas. We are attached, and perhaps with good reason, to these identities; what or who would we be without them? For me, the sense of attachment is greatly diminished, one of the brutal lessons of losing your identities.

So as I read Lara’s blog, a different thought and feeling came to me. Running is an expression of who I am, but it doesn’t define me. Cycling was an expression of who I am, though I don’t express myself much that way anymore. Dancing, singing, playing music are artistic expressions of who I am. Doing bodywork and writing software are completely different expressions of who I am. As a friend, I convey myself in a particular way. As a lover, my heart and soul expresses in a beautiful tangle of bodies and hearts and energies.

Each of these, and more, is an expression of who I am. Each piece is like a hologram, where each piece of a hologram reflects the whole. They flow through me fluidly and easily (mostly).

So, no I am not a runner, but running is a genuine expression of my being and my soul. And it’s sure fun!

Paradox, Science, and Taoism

The Tao gives birth to one

one gives birth to two

two gives birth to three

three gives birth to ten thousand things

-- Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching, verse 42

This first part of the 42nd verse of the Tao Te Ching is absolutely remarkable to me. It is such a precise picture of the universe and yet completely abstract at the same thing.

If you look at it in terms of classic teachings, the Tao can be understood to be the nothingness beyond anything we know with our mind, beyond anything we understand. The one can be understood to be the source energy, the single energy underlying, cradling everything; from everything derives from. The two paints the vision of the polarities that exist in this world – masculine and feminine, light and dark, north and south, sun and moon. Yin and yang in all its amazing forms. It’s also all the paradox that is all around, with each paradox falling apart and settling back into the one the two births from. The three is stepping stone to ten thousand, or the metaphorical infinite. That is everything that exists, in all its forms.

As in any birth, or any definition of birth we understand as humans, there is a lineage and connection back to the parents, grandparents, and so on. In one sense, the Tao is how we can understand that everything remains one and connected, even as there are distinct forms. There is one of those great paradoxes – the distinct forms of each of us or the distinct idea of each rock, plant, and so on, and still it’s connected to everything else.

The word connect, or interconnect, is one of the resolvers of the paradox. To be connected, or interconnected, implies both that there are at least two objects or people that are distinct and yet by being connected they become one! Try to wrap your head around that one – or better not to and just let it be.

If you are more of a scientific bent, you might understand the universe as born from a Big Bang. The Big Bang Theory implies a nothingness before anything (the Tao). Then there is a single entity, a single energy that explodes; the single energy is similar to the one. And as in human conception, cells splits, and that one energy has split apart into two, now we’re at the two above. As the Big Bang progress, then three, then ten thousand, or infinite.

The scientific bent also has wonderful paradoxes, like the dual-nature of light. Depending on what experiment that’s set up, light can either be detected as a wave or as a particle. Wow, that’s wild. Or consider Eintein’s famous equation E=mc2 which says that energy (E) and matter (m) are different forms of the same thing! Then there’s electromagnetic waves which are everywhere being released and absorbed by atoms all the time. Those waves the connection between everything. All atoms, and subatomic particles within, are constantly connecting and interacting.

Reality, as we know it in this universe, can be described in so many ways, from the sublime description of the Tao Te Ching from thousands of years ago which contains so much in so few words, to the deep and philosophical scientific inquiry to understand something of what we experience and put equations to that.

Just some of my random musings about science and philosophy and how they may not be as difference as we like to believe.

Indecision as an Energy Drain

About this time last year I was in the middle of one of my cycles of trying to decide if I wanted to get another car. Every couple weeks I'd look at car reviews, or check Craigslist for used cars. I'd even go out and test drive a car to see what it was like. I'd also redo all the numbers in my head - gas costs, insurance costs, downpayments, interest rates, practicality, car personalities, how much of a car payment could I afford, how much would maintenance cost. This went on for months and months - perhaps 4 or 5 months.

This came back into my thoughts recently as a friend started considering another car as well. She's having similar thoughts and has spent some time already thinking about cars, looking at them, letting it all sink in. I noticed how much energy it was taking for her.

I realized about listening to my friend how much energy I had put into trying to decide on whether to get another car. I did finally decide at some point that I was going to keep the car another two years. After two years I would take a look again, but until then I was free to enjoy my car, and I had that time and energy back to put elsewhere. The simple decision of 'I'm deciding later' was huge. It even changed my view of my car and how I felt driving it. No more ifs, at least for now, just the plain piece of being in it.

While the car is specific example, I never quite realized how much energy indecision cost, how much effort it takes until the idea for this post came about. It makes complete sense now that I've written it. Even the decision to decide later, whether later is a day, a week, a month, three months, is a decision. It stops the wasted energy of stewing. Something my still come up earlier that will require a new decision, but until that time your energy can be more free.