And You Thought Running Was Thoughtless? Part2/3
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There are no securities in nature, life is either a daring adventure or nothing
-Helen Keller
And You Thought Running Was Thoughtless? Part 2/3
As the second and middle part of this article, I am going to share with you some thoughts on how emotions and sensations of pain are part of the journey as a
human, and how running can be a great metaphor for life. I will discuss how giving in to these sensations in running can teach you a great deal about yourself and help you grow not only as a runner, but as a person. Trying to suppress your emotions and running away from pain will leave an emptiness that many people will end up filling with money, sex, drugs, or alcohol. Working to incorporate these things also fills this emptiness and unlike the others, helps us to be better people. I think that this is a great metaphor and you can it and apply it to all areas of life.
One note on pain. I am talking about pain more in the Buddhist context, where suffering is considered pain and suffering is perhaps the main focus in Buddhist teachings. I am not referring to the sharp immediate pain associated with trauma to the body. This would include things like broken bones, sprained ankles, getting tattoos, or piercings. These types of pain are immediate and denote injury. Seeking out this type of pain just for the pain with things like tattoos is also not what I am talking about
The types of pain associated with suffering are more in line with the mental and physical and emotional pain associated with a long day at work, or with being on your feet running for 8 hours, or with losing a loved one or your job. These sensations of pain and suffering are, in my opinion, things we have to come to grips with in life and things that help us deal with situations better. Learning to accept these types of pain helps to make you more healthy emotionally, spiritually, mentally, and physically, and this is something that Growstronger.com is all about.
Part of being human is to feel emotions and pain; part of being alive is to suffer, if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t. To put suffering into a negative context makes it bad, but to look at it as it is-part of being human and just another emotion and feeling- allows one to feel more alive, more high with life, than you could ever do if you gave into it. You will be rewarded with a true high of life that truly allows you to focus now not on the intensity of the pain, but on the beauty of life and the knowledge that you are life, and you are not just running with the trees and rocks and stones and grass, but they are running with you too, they are no different from you. By accepting pain and suffering for what they are and not seeing them as inherently bad, you become more compassionate!
This is not masochism. This is not sexual and pain is certainly not enjoyable to me. I would not want to be subjected to the emotional powder keg you get when you hit the wall every second of everyday. However, this is not because I think it’s bad.
I would get too used to it and it would cease to be what it should be. It is just like the emotions associated with fun and happiness. If someone loved to feel good and to feel the release of riding, say, a roller coaster, they would try to preserve that feeling and not destroy it. If they rode that roller coaster all day every day, the release would become mundane and no longer fun for them. In fact, they would come to see it as a bad thing because its now become just another thing they do that seems purposeless. So no, just because I accept that powder keg doesn’t make me a masochist.
Those feelings are a part of life, and to want to run away from them makes you less alive and less human. To accept them is to feel more alive, more human, and makes what was once mundane, exciting; it makes people and situations that once seemed to annoy you, to not seem all that bad at all. To accept suffering and pain makes you feel more compassionate.
At least to me it does. Perhaps you now think I am certifiably crazy, rambling on about running as though it were the secret to life. But this doesn’t even begin to encompass the range of feelings and the joys of running to me. That is the reason why I run, and so much more.
The conclusion to this article will be posted next week.
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