This is what writing looked like today. A five-mile out and back run along Quincy Shore Drive. Twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit, with a wind chill making it feel like 18 degrees, and when I turned around I got the wind full in my face. My reasoning: If I can do something physical like this, something challenging, and something relatively small, I can finish that scene today. The physical world and the mental/spiritual world are linked in my world; inseparable. If things are good in the physical world, things should be fine in the spirit world. And the opposite of that is true.
So today was another day on the roads. It is important that I do this, I know. I've learned how important it is to my health and mental well-being, and to my creativity, from 48 years of being a runner. When you've reached my age, this is the type of question you should have answered. If you haven't, people might start asking you what the hell you've been doing your whole life.
I get out on the road, and after a mile or so my brain unhinges from the spinal column. The lock falls off the cage, the door swings open, and my id is allowed to roam free. This is the only time in a day when I allow myself to wallow. To hate. To think as freely as I want, without pretense or rules imposed by anyone or anything. All the bile I'm carrying in my mind--about the world, about people, about my life--is flushed away. I become free, and happy in ways I'm not in ordinary life. I have those conversations I should have had, said the things I wish I had said, or couldn't say because society projects these rules on us. And ideas and thoughts sprinkle down onto my conscience that are at once brilliant and silly. Some I keep, and some I simply enjoy during the moment.
Today while running I thought of two lines. Just two. But they finished a scene and they weren't there this morning and now that they're there I wonder why I didn't think of them before.
So today was another day on the roads. It is important that I do this, I know. I've learned how important it is to my health and mental well-being, and to my creativity, from 48 years of being a runner. When you've reached my age, this is the type of question you should have answered. If you haven't, people might start asking you what the hell you've been doing your whole life.
I get out on the road, and after a mile or so my brain unhinges from the spinal column. The lock falls off the cage, the door swings open, and my id is allowed to roam free. This is the only time in a day when I allow myself to wallow. To hate. To think as freely as I want, without pretense or rules imposed by anyone or anything. All the bile I'm carrying in my mind--about the world, about people, about my life--is flushed away. I become free, and happy in ways I'm not in ordinary life. I have those conversations I should have had, said the things I wish I had said, or couldn't say because society projects these rules on us. And ideas and thoughts sprinkle down onto my conscience that are at once brilliant and silly. Some I keep, and some I simply enjoy during the moment.
Today while running I thought of two lines. Just two. But they finished a scene and they weren't there this morning and now that they're there I wonder why I didn't think of them before.
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