Running today I was able to get out of the swirly universe of my head for a few measured paces. For the first time in over a week, running felt good.  I’m used to the dull periods of grinding along the miles and think it’s good discipline for a writer (Haruki Murakami wrote a whole book about this point) so I try not to force transcendence if it doesn’t feel like it’s going to happen.  I just go.

According to Murakami, the dread of running parallels the dread of writing, and overcoming one will give you the strength to overcome the other.  It’s about practice and persistence (sorry if I sound like a high school track coach here, but this is the kind of language you need before a blank screen at 9 a.m. or 10 sets of stairs in the shivering dawn) as much as it is about inspiration and joy.

But sometimes – in running and writing – there are days when you manage to rise above the gruel of it and it’s exceptional.  It feels as if mind and body have cleaved, smoothly and naturally, like two roads coming together in the woods.  It happens rather suddenly, the ache and boredom of the legs and the frantic zigzags of the mind give way to presence, a steady step step step and a mind calmed and rooted in the moment.

So that happened today, and I was temporarily released from my mind’s leaf-cluttered wind tunnel.  Twitter and blogging and cooking and worrying about this and that and what I should or should not be doing and writing and how? And where? and then it was just a steady climb over rocks, the rumpled and dented ridges of the Sierra Norte holding steady to my right, illuminated by the stern light of dusk.  Stella was panting gently behind me and I felt like all that mattered and the only thing in the world at that moment was the feel of body on Earth, body on Earth, body on Earth, and the light on a tree, and the soft hiss of wind through grass, and the chill of evening.

Then, of course, I ran back downhill and home and the wind tunnel in my head roared up again.  It’s amazing how the Internet and ambiguous future life plans can blast my life into 6,798 disparate mosaic pieces.  At times, looking at them all, with the edges that almost fit but not quite, some shinier than others but none without some vague and confusing luster, I want to say : screw it, I’m going to teach English in Japan.

But no.  I will wake up tomorrow and run.  And write.  About running, probably – I’m working on an essay about how the two overlap in writers lives.  So if you know of running writer (famous or not) drop me a line.  When I’m not in the blissful void where I’ve escaped thigh cramps and rampant life over-analysis, I’m all caught up in the struggle to keep sorting through ideas and shaping them into words.  Murakami insists that writing is physical work.  That’s why I need to eat a big slab of bread with warm goat cheese after a few hours of climbing steadily uphill, easing cautiously down.