Running is, in actuality, not thoughtless!

- Chris Regnery

And You Thought Running Was Thoughtless? Part 3/3

This is the last part of this 3-part article. Up until now we have looked at what running does to oneself during the act of running, and we have seen how emotions and pain are not things that we should run away from in running.

To fight them is to fight against something that cannot be beaten without making yourself less of a person. In this last part, I get a little philosophical and a bit more in depth with my metaphor of running being like life. Forgive me if it comes off as a little heady, but hey, running for 5 hours at a time, sometimes you cant help but dig a little deeper into things.

It will never be possible to fully explain running.  Just like Kurt Gödel, who came up with the Incompleteness Theorem for mathematics, who states that you will never be able to truly know a system of mathematics if you have to use that system to define itself.  The only way to reach mathematical truth and full knowledge is to step outside the system.  While in the system you cannot describe it fully because to do so would require you to look at it as a whole, as though it were in your hand, which you cannot do because you are inside it.

It’s like trying to describe a house while sitting in it.  You can make references to the inside, and what it would look like from the outside, but because you cannot get that critical point of view from the outside, you’ll never have full knowledge of the whole house; the truth of the house, so to speak.

Well, the house for Gödel was mathematics and logic.  If you truly want to have complete knowledge, you must step outside the system to see what it is, but you can never do that with math because you cannot describe math with anything except math. Anything else is too imprecise to use, so to Gödel, mathematics was not real, but just a fun tool used to describe reality, but would never get the whole picture because it had limitations.

Limitations are what make math the most accurate way of describing reality. Mathematics is the descriptive language of physics, which is used to describe chemistry, which is used to describe biology, which is the study of life. However, reality doesn’t have limitations, there is something naturally wild about it- hence all the strangeness in quantum mechanics which states that in reality certain things only have a probability of happening and not a certainty of happening, and so to truly grasp reality in its fullest, without any probabilities and theories and equations and limitations, you must be able to get at it by a system without them, a system without limitations, really without a system at all since a true system implies limitations- it requires separate interacting entities-and reality has none of these things, it is a limitless whole.

Well, this may have pissed a lot of mathematicians off, but it works well for this analogy.  If you were to try to get a runner to describe what it is about running they like or enjoy, or try to get them to explain why they do it, as soon as they open their mouth it has been reduced to something its not and they know it.

Running is a metaphor for truth and life. It is an individual’s expression of freedom. It is in a way, an art. The fluid effortless motion of a good runner is a beautiful thing and an expression of the runner. Each runner is different and each has their own stride, they each paint a different picture on the canvas of reality. A look at a runner should be enough to describe why they run, just as a look at a Picasso painting would answer most people’s question of why make art. In fact it is just the same as asking an artist why they paint or sculpt- the answer will never be enough.  It lies beyond descriptions in a way that to try and describe it is limiting the limitless.

Zen has something to say about this as do many religions.  Many meta-physicians also know of this truth.  The idea that you can know something with all of your being but you can’t describe it, and so it comes out as a sound, a gesture, Mu, what-have-you, shows that they know what they are talking about, so to speak.

So running is art, is Zen, is Mu, is Jesus, is God, is life, is you, and is me.  Yet it isn’t.  Its a statement of mind not a statement of words, which is why I think so many runners have a hard time describing why they run and come up with something half-assed like, ” I run because I can”, or “Why not”, or “seems like fun”, or “My dad used to beat me when I was a kid so I ran away from him until I decided I liked the feeling and joined the track team”.

These are glib answers and are offered only because in seeing the essence of running, like life, they can’t put a handle on it with words without coming up short, very short. To try and describe why a runner runs with a full-assed answer would leave you with a treatise like this, and yet all that I have said in all this is that you can’t say anything at all. Perhaps this is why to this day I will tell people to go out and run a good distance themselves, and then they will have their own answer.

The real truths in life are not told to you, they cannot be taught in the classroom, although you can teach someone the best ways to find truths, they are only what others have used to find them, truths themselves are not describable. They are attainable only by experiencing them firsthand. To know them you must feel them, but they are more than a feeling- their knowledge comes before any explanation and they are greater than any system of description such as language or mathematics.

You must live life, and not shut off or shut out aspects of it you don’t like. This is not to say that we should be okay with murderers and rapists and the like, and it is not to say that we should prescribe to some sort of anarchist mentality.

It does mean that to be a human, means that we must accept that humans are capable of some pretty horrible, gruesome, unsettling things. We are also however, capable of some extraordinarily beautiful and altruistic things.

We must deal with this darker side, but not shut it out. To lock it away allows it to grow until it becomes unwieldy. We must harness this side of ourselves and use it. This is the passion many people will describe they have when they are writing a novel, or painting, or are out with their kids, or when they are drafting a proposal at work, or making a sale for their job, or while running through the mountains.

This passion makes one feel alive; I run to be able to reach out and touch reality herself, although at times I feel she is the one that touches me. You are a human, both with the good and bad, to shut one out, you are only shorting yourself part of your own humanity.

Anyway, I have now rambled on for far too long about something that I say can’t be nailed down with words.  So, to avoid self destruction and running the risk of sounding preachy, which I fear I have already done, I leave you now to find your own meanings and to, as always, work to help yourself GrowStronger.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 by Blake at 4:56 pm and is filed under Mind-Body. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.