Running Is a Kind of Dreaming

by J. M. Thompson

  Someone dimmed the lights. I heard a bell ring. The room was quiet. I observed my breath. The ox of my mind crashed through the barrier of my attention. I nodded off. Minutes felt like hours. My knees hurt. The pattern on the carpet looked like it was breathing.

  It was raining hard when I woke some months later on the morning of the daylong retreat. My clothes were damp when I entered the zendo and sat down on one of the cushions. I survived the first forty-minute period of zazen, shivering. After that there was a five-minute period of kinhin, walking meditation. It was a relief to stand and move my legs even in this weird slow walk the kinhin involved. I struggled through a second and third period of zazen.

  By the end of the third period daylight was streaming through the windows in the zendo. I could tell it was a sunny day outside. I thought of Miriam and our daughter at home. Come back to the breath—isn’t that what I’m supposed to do? The longer I counted my breath, the more I thought of Miriam and our beautiful little girl. In the early afternoon the retreat organizers made an announcement. You could speak to a priest about how the retreat was going for you, in a formal meeting called dokusan. “Sign me up,” I said. The priest they sent me to was Shosan Gigen.

  “I’m thinking about my wife and baby daughter,” I said. “I know I’m not supposed to. But I am.”

  “Perhaps that is your practice now,” she said. “To be with them. Not here in the temple. The zendo isn’t going anywhere. But your daughter will only be two for a little while. Go to them.”

  I left the temple and ran the two miles home.

  A decade later I went back. I had been studying Zen for several years by then. I could sit still and meditate all day. I had studied the Bodhisattva Precepts, the ethical principles of Zen Buddhism: Don’t kill. Don’t lie. Don’t steal. Don’t gossip. Don’t intoxicate your mind with substances. I wanted to make a formal commitment as a Zen Buddhist to live by those vows. In Zen this involves a ceremony called jukai, in which you make the following pledge: “All of my ancient twisted karma, from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, born through body, speech, and mind, I now fully avow.” You accept who you are. You look back at the path that got you here, back to your birth, and your ancestors, back through time, all the steps that led up to you. You acknowledge them and walk forward with dignity.

  Early in my study of Zen I came across the idea of the Four Dignities. It conveys the idea that every moment of your life presents an opportunity for the kind of open, focused awareness cultivated in meditation. The Four Dignities are the four basic postures of the body: sitting, standing, walking, lying down. Later it occurred to me that there are an infinite number of dignities. There is the dignity of laundry. The dignity of brushing your teeth. The dignity of being human. I like to think of running as the Fifth Dignity.

  To prepare for jukai, Shosan told me, I would need to sew a rakusu, a rectangular piece of cloth that hangs around the neck, like the one I had seen the teacher wearing the first time I went to the Zen Center.

  I went to the Zen temple sewing class and started stitching. It was the first time I’d sewn anything since I made a penguin in Mrs. Mahon’s class when I was nine. Like almost everything else from Cannon Road, the penguin had disappeared. Sometimes in between my stiches I would picture my lost penguin and the boy I once was who had lost him. “While you are sewing,” said Shosan, “repeat this mantra in your mind: Namu kie Butsu. Namu kie Ho. Namu kie So.”

  It was Japanese that referred to the Three Refuges of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Butsu is Buddha, the possibility of liberation. Ho is Dharma, the teachings about that possibility. So is Sangha, the community of people who aspire to live by those teachings. Namu kie Butsu: I take refuge in the Buddha. Namu kie Ho: I take refuge in the Dharma. Namu kie So: I take refuge in the Sangha.

  I told Shosan about my plan to run around Lake Tahoe.

  “Take refuge when you’re running,” she said. “Take refuge in the mountain.”

  * * *

  The forest feels infinite. I hike through the trees, contemplating the possibility that I will never leave them. Everything hurts. My feet, my legs, my back, my shoulders, my neck, my lips, my tongue. I’m around 130 miles in. It’s hard enough to contemplate the thousands of steps I’ll need to make it to the next aid station, 5 miles from here, let alone the 70 miles still left after that. Namu . . . kie . . . Butsu. Here I am, in the forest. Yes, there is pain. But beauty too. Don’t run away from it. Turn toward it. Don’t block it out. Don’t wish anything were otherwise. There’s nothing else but this—step—now. Namu . . . kie . . . Butsu. I turn toward my shin pain. I turn toward my blistered feet and ulcerated tongue and sunburn and my stale-sweat stink and the trees and dirt and sky and the pain again and the sky again and this step and now and pain and beauty and Earth and heaven and the left foot and the right one. There is nothing outside this—step—now. I have always been here. I will always be here. Every step is home.

  Home Again

  I drove to the ocean. It was still dark in the early morning. Sometimes the water was invisible beneath a shroud of fog. Other times the sky was clear. I could see the stars and moon. I understood that the stars had always been there. But I had never seen them shining with such brightness. Sometimes I would watch the giant cargo ships on the dark horizon, arriving at the Golden Gate after their long journey across the ocean from Asia, illuminated like Christmas trees in pink and purple lights. I felt my feet squish on the soft, wet sand and listened to the roar of the wind and felt on my face the cold, damp air that smelled of kelp and burnt firewood. Pelicans flew in a triangular formation low above the water. I saw satellites drifting in the blackness high above me. In the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous I had heard about the need to find a power greater than myself. I came to believe in what I could see and feel and touch and smell and hear. I believed in the smell of seaweed and the cry of seagulls and the twinkle of Orion. Sometimes memories of the distant past bubbled into awareness as the rhythm of my feet on the ground reminded me of rhythms and feelings long forgotten and presumed irrecoverable. Home again, home again, jiggety-jig, I thought. It was what we had said when we got home. I would hear the crunch of our green Citroën on the gravel driveway in Cannon Road and all of us would say it together: me and Mummy and Daddy and Sebastian. We were home again. I was home again.

  At the start, running felt effortful and awkward, reminiscent of what I’d experienced when I was learning to drive as a teenager: a discombobulated sequence of movements I consciously willed into being one at a time, until the movements eventually burned grooves into my cerebellum and became as automatic as breathing. But over time running became effortless. I found an easy pace, and I didn’t feel out of breath. It felt as natural as walking, and I noticed how it helped me to stand tall when I ran, shoulders relaxed, arms held loose, noticed the way my jaw clenched if I started obsessing about something, and how to relax my jaw was to unclench my mind. I learned how to take care of a sore calf and an inflamed and tender mid-foot, to understand what this pain was asking of me, and how to listen to it like the cry of a frightened child. I felt how the daily run put structure in the day, formed a rhythm that other parts of my life started to beat in time with. I learned to run farther and farther through the hills, and I found out how after being outside in the cold fog and going home and getting into the bath, I was wrapped in a warmth that soaked into every cell and every wounded part of me.

  As I ran in the dark on the wet sand, I would feel the Earth coming up to meet me with every footfall, a rhythm of sound and motion that held me and rocked me, as if the solid ground became my mother’s arms, wrapped around the infant I once had been. “I don’t know where I’m headed,” I would say, and Earth said: This way. “I don’t know who I am,” I said, and Earth said: Feel your left foot landing and now your right. That’s it. Feel your chest rise and fall. Feel your arms swing back and forth. Listen to the wind. Behold the birds in the air above you. Pay attention to the moon. Observe the gap between tak
eoff and landing, the space when you are airborne, yet how I come back to you with each step. You can trust that I am with you. I will never go away. I am Earth.

  NEPTUNE WAS THE GOD of the sea. In the ancient world, the sea was the chaotic realm that stood between the known world and distant lands. To seek far-off shores, you had to get on a boat. You also had to cross the sea when you wanted to return home again. Both voyages were risky. You could drown. You could find yourself shipwrecked and alone on a strange island. You could run out of fresh water and start drinking salt water and go insane. But water was also the medium of transformation. The literal and symbolic domain where the soul could seek new lands and find its way back home. Find your way to safe harbor and you can heal. You can start to make sense of the times you felt at sea. Chaotic memories and frantic thinking can settle into a feeling of coherence and centered calm.

  That feeling comes from the kind of reorganization in the brain and mind that becomes possible in a restorative environment: someplace where you can run free. Experimental studies of nonhuman animals yield persuasive evidence illuminating some of the key chemical mechanisms involved. Some years ago a group of neurobiologists assembled a group of mouse depressives.14 When a mouse is hung upside down by its tail, it tries to wriggle away. If the mouse soon abandons its escape attempt, it is understood to be depressed.

  The scientists put the sad mice in a playground. They had never dreamed such freedom might be possible! The mice skipped and scampered about. Their depression faded away. The scientists looked inside their brains. They were interested in a chemical called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF. It helps new cells grow in a region of the brain called the hippocampus that underpins the capacity to learn and remember. After the mice ran out to play, they had more BDNF in their brains. Further research has shown that running has a similar effect on human brains. When you run, you remember what it feels like to be free.

  THERE IS A SONG I used to sing in the choir at Glide Memorial before I went into the hospital that went like this:

  We fall down, but we get up

  For a saint is just a sinner

  Who fell down

  And got up.

  I was no saint. But I did get up. Nothing had prepared me for the emotions that flooded my awareness when I put down the chemical shield I’d so long held against them. Abstinence from booze and drugs was hard enough. I missed Charlie. Without her arms wrapped around me, I was alone again, naked and afraid. Every day on the inside I battled with the urge to get high, the knowledge of the calamitous consequences of doing so, memories of the degradation to which I’d succumbed. But the real challenge of living sober had less to do with the absence of intoxication and more to do with the presence of feelings I was ill-equipped to handle. Everything felt uncertain. I didn’t want to die anymore. I wanted to live, but I didn’t know how. I was fat, drug-addicted, lonely, scared, ashamed, and angry.

  I knew big words. But nothing I had ever learned from my parents or my teachers or in the thousands of books I’d read had equipped me to handle life. If the School of Life gave classes on how a sad person was supposed to avoid turning into a suicidal drug addict, I had missed them.

  I EMBRACED THE LIFE of a distance runner with the repentant zeal of the sinner who fell down and got up again. I read all the running books. I read Runner’s World, Running Times, and Trail Runner magazines. I read every running blog on the internet. I watched all the good running movies, then all the bad ones, then random online montages of unedited running footage, cut with cheesy ’80s rock anthems that made me weep with a new emotion. It wasn’t sadness. It wasn’t joy. The closest term I could find to describe the feeling was what the Japanese call mono no aware, literally “the pathos of things,” a bittersweet awareness of the transience of all phenomena. I was alive and healthy, and I could run all day in the forest and the mountains. It couldn’t last. One day I would die. But what a marvel it was in the moment at last to really feel alive!

  I ran every day. I ran when I was hot and when I was cold and when I was hungry and thirsty and tired and hurting and delirious. I ran until I didn’t want to run anymore and then I kept on running. I ran until all my sweat and sore muscles and the stronger legs and lungs and willpower that came from all those millions of steps on the road and through the hills and woods had given me a kind of knowledge, in the way the body knows things, that feelings were survivable.

  It’s going to be all right, my body came to understand. Feel the feeling. Breathe in. Breathe out. Stay with it. There were names for the sensations that for so long had struck me outside conscious awareness as impulses to get high or leave the country or kill myself.

  Hello, sadness. Hello, fear. Hello, shame. I can hear you. Sure, I’ll listen to your bad ideas. Sadness, you want me to lie down and never get up again. I’m getting up. Fear, you want me to get the hell out of here. I feel you, man. But I’m staying. Shame, you want me to go hide in the corner and keep my mouth shut. I want to go play outside with the others in the sun. It’s dark inside here with you, old buddy. So goodbye. I imagine you’ll be back. I confess, my heart is rather full these days. But you’re always welcome down in the basement.

  Years later I was staying in a house by the Northern Californian coast when a little bird flew in but couldn’t find its way out again. I opened a window and a large sliding door, but the bird kept flying against a single spot on a closed window near the ceiling, far out of reach above me, smashing its head against the glass, over and over again. Miriam and my children and I called to the bird. “This way!” we said, pointing to the way out through the open door. But the bird kept flying back and forth, smashing its head against the glass. I found a stepladder and climbed to the area near the ceiling and the bird. I cupped my hands to form a sphere in which I held the frightened bird. It went limp. “It’s dead!” I felt so sad for the bird. I hadn’t meant to kill it. But after all that thrashing against the window, the shock of my hands had overwhelmed the poor little thing. I took the dead bird outside and laid it on the ground. I sat with Miriam and our children looking at the ocean. “I feel sorry for the bird,” my daughter said. “Me too,” I said. Time passed—perhaps twenty minutes, as we sat there looking at the ocean and feeling sorry about the bird. Then we saw its lifeless body start to twitch. Then the twitching exploded into a kind of shudder that became a flutter of wings and the bird flapped away and was gone. The bird had been frozen. In the face of overwhelming stress, an ancient evolutionary defense mechanism, deep in the core of its nervous system, had kicked in to paralyze the bird. In the first days and weeks of sobriety, I could feel my nervous system twitching and shuddering as the frozen state of drug and alcohol dependence began to thaw.

  From the bible of the sport, a book called Lore of Running, by the exercise physiologist Tim Noakes, I gleaned the basic principles of how the body adapts to training. I felt some affinity with Steve Austin, hero of The Six Million Dollar Man, a TV show I’d liked watching as a boy, in the opening credits of which we learn he had been an astronaut, nearly killed in a horrible accident, then reassembled by hi-tech boffins into a cybernetically enhanced version of his former self: “Steve Austin, astronaut. A man barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.”

  I decided that I would rebuild myself through running. Jason Thompson, disheveled Englishman. I have the books and blogs and videos. I will become a bionic version of myself. Better. Stronger. Faster.

  I ran a marathon. I ran fifty kilometers. I ran fifty miles, and then a hundred miles. Running restored rhythm to my life. For as long as I could remember, I had never felt like anything in my experience was truly trustworthy. I was always afraid that the ground could collapse at any second and I’d have to run away again. A boy afraid of the Bomb became a man afraid of his own mind. It’s impossible to trust other people until you can trust
yourself. Running made my own experience trustworthy. Every step was much like the last one, and the feelings in a run followed a reliable sequence, from the sluggish, awkward inertia of the first ten minutes, to the sensation of everything loosening up, to the long stretch of dreaming and flowing, to the creep of fatigue, to the warm afterglow that would last well into the morning. I came to know this rhythm in the intuitive way that you know how to ride a bike or sew or drive a car or dance the salsa: the kind of how-to knowledge that, given enough repetition, gets folded into muscle memory. You learn the steps and practice, practice, practice, and soon enough you don’t have to worry that you’ll ever forget them. The body remembers, so the thinking mind doesn’t need to.

  I learned how to relax in the midst of intense sensation, how to notice spots of tension, like a clenched jaw or tightness in my shoulders, and release them. I learned that it was better, feeling pain, to contain it in awareness, with a sense of lightness, not checking out from it, not punishing myself, but just noticing it, relaxing around it, being with it, staying with it. I noticed how after running fast like this all my other runs felt easier and easier. I noticed that the willingness to stay with the experience, to set an intention to do something hard, however arbitrary, and then do it, created a sense of internal trustworthiness, feelings of confidence and competence, a kind of embodied knowing that I could stay with not just running but anything. Anything at all.

  After two years of running and staying sober, I felt more solid on the inside than I could remember feeling in a long time. I wasn’t depressed. I didn’t have any cravings for drugs or alcohol. I had found quieter and more reliable sources of joy: the feeling of flying through the woods and hills; the feeling of togetherness with Miriam and our two-year-old daughter; the deep fulfillment of teaching students in my new job at an elementary school. I trusted that I wasn’t going to drink or do drugs again. I trusted that I could pick a point two miles away and run toward it and get there. I trusted that if I told you I’d see you tomorrow, I wasn’t going to wake up in the morning depressed or freaking out and need to bail.