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Running Up That Hill
I have a huge project coming up in November that will take me around the world. In order to prep for this trip, I have also been forcing my body into shape, which at 52 is far harder than it used to be.
I have been running at least two miles a day for the past few months, and on one of my routes is a decent hill at the end of the run. When I started training, I HATED that hill. But as I was running yesterday, it dawned on me that this is now my favorite part of the route.
I love the test at the end of the run: Do you have anything left to push up this hill? Should you?
So, with a smile on my face, I push, I curse, and then eventually I crest the hill into the cool down.
There is a Buddhist saying that has been misquoted, likely forever, that says, “All life is suffering.” The word the Buddha used was Dukkha, from a long-dead language, and “suffering” is the word we have put in its place.
While suffering is not a perfect translation, it explains part of Dukkha, but not all of it. It might be closer to say that the unenlightened experience life as suffering, but even that isn’t perfect, since enlightenment isn’t necessarily a permanent state.
While I am clearly not an expert in Buddhism, I can say that there is power in leaning into the hills.
Which is funny because, after I had been running for a few months, my youngest asked me, “Dad, do you like running?”
To which I quipped, “No, not particularly.”
He looked confused. “Then why do it?”
Because I like the feeling from running, not the feeling of running.
To me, that feels like a form of enlightenment.
The End of the Bronze Age
Last night I took my youngest to see The Odyssey in 70mm IMAX before it leaves today. Seeing it a second time, for me, is where the film really shines.
The first time, I was blown away and in shock at the scale, the story, and the technical prowess it took to pull the film off. The second time, I could appreciate it for the art that it is.
Watching the story unfold as Odysseus comes to terms with the understanding that he and his men are the marauding “people from the sea,” and that they alone have sent the world into chaos because of the blind ambition of Agamemnon, is a prescient statement on the timeline we currently inhabit.
A time when kindness and the act of welcoming strangers have given way to the age of the “other” and distrust of those who don’t look or sound like us. Zeus’s law has been broken by the audacity of man.
There was a moment at the end of the film where Penelope and Odysseus sail west to honor his men, chasing the fading sun, and Penelope turns to Odysseus and asks:
“Why will the stories only be sung?”
Odysseus responds:
“Because song will be all they have to remember those of us who could write.”
A line I didn’t clock the first time stunned me on a second watch.
We live in an era nearly devoid of all adventure—a world made of Nerf. Where machines arrive to think and write for us as we chase something we call efficiency.
The whole experience left me wondering if modern man’s age of Bronze is also collapsing because we, too, lived in a “world of palaces and trade, language, blind to its beauty, until we broke it.”
That said, much like the ending of the film, I also feel “a new dawn will break over the darkened world, when our mistakes will once again be forgotten.”
That is a day I certainly look forward to.
Feeling Analog
I am in a very analog mode as of late, the notifications of modernity giving way to tactile ghosts from another time.
It started before COVID, when I was creating dad jokes for my kids’ lunches. Each kid got a joke, there were no repeats, and it was written on a typewriter. We are powering through the sixth year of that, and now the jokes are hand-painted with watercolors instead of pen and ink or the typewriter.