You know those email chain letters that get passed around by your friends who forward every darn thing that hits their inboxes? I hate those. I never read those. I never forward those. If anyone tells you he received one of those things from me, tell him he’s a liar, and if you’re one of those people who forwards that junk, get off the computer and get a life. Your friends will appreciate it.
Email wasn’t always so fraught with SPAM and clutter. There was a time when electronic communication was new and every message was exciting. Sometime in those early days, I found myself reading a message that I certainly would skip over today. It spoke about the power of prayer to shape one’s day. You may have seen it: the idea is that the writer was so busy one day that he didn’t have time to pray. Consequently, the day, figuratively, went to hell. He learned his lesson, so the next day he was so busy, he had to take time to pray.
Now, I’m not the type of guy who turns everything that happens to me into a spiritual event. I am, however, the type of guy who tries to recognize truth when I read it. The truth in that story about prayer is not that your day will go to hell if you don’t pray in the morning; the truth is that there are certain things we should do on a regular basis that will make us feel better when our day/week/life gets out of control. Breakfast, for example, could just as easily be substituted for prayer in that email and its truth would ring just as loudly. So could running.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve found myself too busy or too worn out from other activities to go for a run. That’s painful to admit because a large part of my identity is tied to running. Everyone I work with knows I’m a runner. Everyone I socialize with knows I’m a runner. Everyone I know knows I’m a runner. Yet sometimes my body absolutely forgets I’m a runner. Sometimes we, as runners, joke that when we get crabby our spouses will insist we go for a run to make us easier to live with. That doesn’t work when our symptom isn’t crabbiness from non-running but simple exhaustion from a crazy life.
So what’s one to do when every moment is filled with getting ready for work, working, and recovering from work, with lots of after-work commitments thrown in?
Well?
What?
I sure as heck wish that were a rhetorical question and I was ready with a simple answer. I don’t have one, though. I only have the question . . . and this desire to return to what I know myself to be . . . a runner.
