A few days ago I scrawled this in my training journal. Here it is, raw and uncut.
Every time I stand the darkness closes in. Starting from my heart, it pulses around my body as I waiver and stagger, waiting for the kick in the back of my knees which sends me slumping against a granite countertop or a hardwood floor.
Sitting in the deathly blackness, my heart rate rises and the world is once again intelligible. With the return of my sight I move toward the door and walk over the threshold into the light of a July afternoon. Bathed in sunshine reflecting off the black asphalt, I first shuffle, then run. By the time my footsteps echo on the main street of this one horse farming town my heart, so recently hardly beating, awakes; I have never been more alive.
Every stride I take is a paradox. Through a lifetime of training my body has taken on the characteristics of a high performance sports car: The ability to maintain high speeds for long periods necessitates a death-defying idle; every mile I run is facilitated by a personal intimacy with the threshold of non-being. Each evening jog brings me closer to that threshold, instilling me with humility that the doorway into the darkness is never more than a stride away.
Surely the interconnectedness of being and non-being is a paradox. Synthesizing this paradox and putting that synthesis to work against life’s everyday antithesises enables me to set one foot in front of the other each day and find meaning in the darkness.