Baby We Were Born to Run

You walk four blocks to a nearby garage concert of a budding singer-songwriter.

You are entranced by the glowing sunset ambiance, the candor with which Paul Baribeau shares his inspiration and obstacles, the raw emotion behind these songs and lyrics--especially when he opens on his thoughts about suicide, life, and death.

You buy his new album--a collection of Springsteen covers in Baribeau's signature rough-cut voice.

You find yourself hoping it's some insane mistake that your friend and travel buddy is reported to have died a sudden and probably never to be completely mystified death in Thailand.

You for the first time really see cover of that album you bought some three days ago:

Everything dies baby that's a fact/But maybe everything that dies someday comes back

You for the first time really hear the words of that now-gut-wrenching song:

All we have is time, time, time

And someday that time will run out

And that's the only thing we can be absolutely certain about.

You for the first time feel this pang of loss for someone you loved...but realize that pang mostly not for your own loss but for the loss of a loved one of your loved ones.

You read a book on the plane to the funeral.

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World as Never Seen b Christopher McDougall

This book is about running...

         in a new way, a natural way, 

                about evolution, about roots,

                          about humanity, living in a non-automatic way, embracing each moment of competition, collaboration, collective humanity.

And it happens to also have a title linked to Springsteen and now Baribeau.  Coincidence...I think not.

The thoughts that follow are about running, but also about daoing ideally, about a way to reach a point of virtuosity where doing something (really doing something) becomes easier than not doing it, about truly living and creating.  Running in mind mind is no longer just running--it is a symbol, for what Adil showed us.  Here's to life:

"That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: They'd never forgotten what it felt like to love running.  They remembered that a running was mankind's first fine art, our original act of inspired creation.  Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain.  And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs...a downward slash, lightning bolts through the bottom and middle--behold, the Running Man." (92)

"There are two goddesses in your heart--the Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth.  Everyone thinks they need to get wealth first, and wisdom will come.  So they concern themselves with chasing money.  But they have it backwards.  you have to give your heart to the Goddess of Wisdom, give her all your love and attention, and the Goddess of Wealth will become jealous, and follow you." (94)

"...There was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love running.  ...We wouldn't be alive without love; we wouldn't have survived without running; maybe we shouldn't be surprised that getting better at one could make you better at the other." (98)

"Perhaps all our troubles--all the violence, obesity, illness, depression, and greed we can't overcome--began when we stopped living as Running People.  Deny your nature, and it will erupt in some other, uglier way." (99)

"When you run on the earth and with the earth, you can run forever." (114)  Connection, humans and their landscape, humans and each other, and that irreplaceable awareness.

"Whenever an art form loses its fire, when it gets weakened by intellectual inbreeding and first principles fade into stale tradition, a radical fringe eventually appears to blow it up and rebuild from the rubble." (148)  Creation out of destruction.  Shiva would be proud.  Also stirs up a good amount of hope for humanity.

About the importance of living in awareness, rather than automaticity:  "Feet live for a fight and thrive under pressure; let them laze around...and they'll collapse.  Work them out, and they'll arc up like a rainbow. ...The barefoot walker receives a continuous stream of information about the ground and about his own relationship to it, while a shod foot sleeps inside an unchanging environment." (177).  Get outside, get dirty, get aware.

"Runners are assembly-line workers; they become good at one thing--moving straight ahead at a steady speed--and repeat that motion until overuse fritzes out the machinery.  Athletes are Tarzans.  Tarzan swims and wrestles and jumps and swings on vines.  he's strong and explosive.  you never know what Tarzan will do next, which is why he never gets hurt." (210)

"When tracking an animal, one attempts to think like an animal in order to predict where it is going...Looking at its tracks, one visualizes the motion of the animal and feels that motion in one's own body.  you go into a trancelike state, the concentration is so intense. ...Visualization...empathy...abstract thinking and forward projection: ...isn't that exactly the mental engineering we now use for science, medicine, the creative arts" (235)

"Running was the superpower that made us human--which means it's a superpower all humans possess." (239)

"you don't stop running because you get old.  you get old because you stop running." (240)

"It's easy to get outside yourself when you're thinking about someone else." (253)

"That head of his has been occupied with contemporary society's insoluble problems for so long, and he is still battling on with good-heartedness and boundless energy.  His efforts have not been in vain, but he will probably not live to see them come to fruition." --Theo Van Gogh (1889)