First things first: 7.02 miles at a dead 12-minute pace. Not too shabby.
Yeah, that’s a pretty slow pace. But that doesn’t mean my running isn’t progressing smoothly. I ran the whole thing, even the long ramp up from the Schuylkill River Trail to South Street. My feet might have been a little sore, but the calf tightness that’s been plaguing me most of the year has disappeared almost entirely, and the nascent hip pointer I felt last week didn’t make an appearance. All in all, it’s going well.
Lifting, too, seems to be progressing. I’m consistent, I’m adding weight, if not dramatically, and I (usually) feel pretty dang good after my workouts. Add in the much better diet I’ve been eating over the last few weeks, and there’s not really much to complain about on the physical health front.
And yet…
I do feel better. That’s undeniable. My movements feel more fluid, and simple things like bending down to tie my shoes don’t seem as tedious as they did only a few months earlier. I walk with more authority, I don’t pant when I jog up the stairs, and I make less noise when I stand. Mentally, too, exercise and more thoughtful eating have left me in a much better place, feeling more resilient and less liable to crack the moment things don’t go exactly according to plan.
But when I look in the mirror, it’s not so apparent. Sure, there’s more muscle there than, say, when I lived in Baltimore, or before I started lifting weights here in Philly. But my gut, that frustrating protuberance, remains stubbornly in place. Maybe it’s smaller, I don’t know. It’s hard to tell because all I can see is the fact of its existence. This gut, this belly, this domed convexity…this is the shape that keeps me lifting, keeps me running, and keeps me wondering if it’s all worth it. Don’t worry, I’m not dysmorphic. If anything, I’m entirely too aware of the shape of my body.
But what I am is impatient. Desperately impatient. Utterly impatient.
Like many others, I’m sure, I suffer from the desire to have everything everywhere, all at once, and yes I know that’s also a movie title but it’s too relevant here to rephrase. I want everything I’ve ever dreamed of, ever thought of, ever considered thinking about, to come to pass. My problem is that I combine an overabundance of ideas with a complete destitution of follow-through. In that sense, it’s not so much I want to do all the things as it is that I wish I had already done them.
Take pottery, right? Remember how I said I was bothered by the fact that I wasn’t immediately good at throwing ceramics on the wheel? And how that initial, entirely to be expected incompetence made me wonder, at least momentarily, if it was worth the effort? After all, who knows how long it could take for me to gain even the barest patina of competence, let alone excellence, and if excellence is not in the offing, then what exactly is the goal? Do I have better ways to spend my time, ways that might be more profitable?
I made peace with my terrible pottery, and found the joy in the process. But it does point to this ineradicable sense of impatience that seems to color everything I set out to do. This, in turn, leads to scads of ideas scribbled on paper on in my Notes app, all of which languish in varying states of unpacking until they end up covered over by new scads of ideas, none of which develop into anything beyond a notion.
What’s the problem with me? Is it a lack of intestinal fortitude? A dearth of grit? A problem with work ethic? What is going on inside my brain, or inside my core being, that makes it so difficult to push through that impatience and get to work?
To be fair to myself, I know what all of those things are, the grit and fortitude and drive to complete tasks that make the world move forward. I’ve experienced them myself—you don’t finish a dissertation without blundering your way into at least one of those qualities. I’ve put in work on projects, and I’m proud of the way I’ve persevered through trials and tribulations at times. But quality is it some people possess that allows them to draw from that wellspring again and again, as if on cue, without the threat of consequence hanging above their heads?
For me, the problem with impatience always comes back to time, or more specifically, the lack of time. When it comes to achievement, I feel like the sense of how long things should take always feels compressed. It’s old hat to say the world moves faster than ever, but it’s also true. To quote The Shawshank Redemption, the world went and got itself into a big damn hurry. The speed at which events proceed, and at which we learn about them, can be blinding. The world can change in a second, in ways great and small, and sometimes without us even noticing.
So why doesn’t that happen with the things we want to achieve?
I’m not usually one to blame movies and TV, but here I think it’s at least a little warranted. Heck, even novels are a little to blame. In all of these forms, time is compressed into a much smaller space. Even the Greeks, with their unity of time (all action taking place over the course of 24 hours), stretched the bounds of a day, perhaps not to the lengths of Jack Bauer, but certainly to heightened levels of human expectation.
For the most part, you simply can’t expect an audience to watch real-time action. Why should you? They live real-time; when they read a book or see a movie or TV show, they’re expecting to see something exceptional. For the storyteller, cutting time is critical. To better frame a story, to better explore characters, it’s imperative that you cut out the junk. And perhaps nothing better exemplifies this than the montage.
Rocky training throughout the streets of Philadelphia. Carl and Ellie living their entire marriage in the moments before Carl floats his house away with balloons. Daniel failing and failing in his training before the still of him standing on one foot atop a pier. The Tri-Lambs fix up their house to an upbeat musical score, bonding as a frat while upending expectations about nerds.* Heck, Team America: World Police even has a song devoted to how montages work. My favorite lyric? “Always fade out in a montage / If you fade out, it seems like more time / Has passed in a montage.”
* I enjoyed Revenge of the Nerds when I first saw it back in the early ‘90s. I understand now how problematic this movie is, and while I hold no ill will against those who made the movie, fitting as it did into the larger cultural zeitgeist, I just can’t watch it and not feel horrendously uncomfortable. But the montage is classic ‘80s. Just watch that part.
But of course, time will move at its own pace. You can experience time differently, but that’s not time changing—that’s you. Time flies when you’re having fun. Time dies when you’re waiting in a doctor’s office. Cold, gray, winter days drag on for years, but the summer can fly past in the beat of a hummingbird’s wing. Coffee in the morning slips all to quickly into a commute, then sits idly as we wait for our day’s work to filter onto to our desk. But time itself doesn’t change. The tick of a second is no longer or shorter, no matter how you experience it.
Let’s come back to my body (first time I’ve said that). Yes, I’ve been working to transform myself with varying levels of commitment over the last few months. Or years. Or days, depending on when you count. Considering the number of years I spent building my regrettable shape, it shouldn’t be any wonder it has resisted efforts to build it up and slim it down. But the biggest resistance I face is my own expectations, in the face of the solid reality that is time.
Lifting heavier weights won’t accelerate time. Eating more protein and less sugar won’t send days flying past. And while on a subatomic level I may be screwing around with time when I run, those relativistic changes are so miniscule as to amount to nothing. I can’t run myself into next week or month or year. When I finish my run, I am essentially the same person, in the cosmic perspective. I’ve simply made a choice, and that choice takes time to bear fruit.
It’s easy to lose sight of the fact of just how much work undergirds the final product that stands before you. A writer doesn’t usually sit down and bang out a novel in a couple of days. There’s real sweat that goes into those pages, rivers of blood from sacrificing your babies. Favorite passages lie cold and dead upon the floor, excised for the health of the patient. Playwrights often edit and revise their works up until opening day—and sometimes beyond. Even those artists who create a nearly finished work on their first pass must spend hours and hours editing and revising, even if those edits don’t end up changing much.
All this invisible work, so easily dismissed. All the hidden effort, the silent screams, the unwinnable fights against time and money and illusive, unattainable perfection. The audience sees the results; they don’t see the ground meat and torn casings surrounding the creators. The product is not the process. The process is not the product. Often, there is no product at all, and we are left with only the process itself.
Somewhere, deep in the brain, I imagine there’s a switch. This switch controls your drive, perhaps your obsession, to bring something to a close. When you have an idea, it’s as though an electrode brushes past this switch, making a fleeting connection. The only way to get this switch to function for longer, to have any control over its function, is to discover how to splice the bare end of that wire into the connector. And that may be the greatest trick of all, for those who have yet to discover the secret. People like me.
But time is something of a gift, too.
This weekend, my wife and I returned once again to Longwood Gardens. One of my favorite parts of our membership are the spring member’s hours, which grants us access to the gardens in the hour before they open to the general public. During spring bloom season, that is a gift indeed. We were free to stroll amongst the daffodils and tulips, interspersed with spears of hyacinth and scrubs of Japanese holly, untroubled by the mass of garden visitors who would soon descend and turn this peaceful stretch of flowerbeds into a madhouse.
Perhaps it’s ironic, as we strolled along beds of impatiens, that I found myself falling away from my rushed and exhausted feelings. I felt relaxed, at peace, separated from the need to be doing something without the drive to decide exactly what it should be. Walking through the expansive and far less populated portion of the garden we refer to as simply “the Meadow,” I felt a sense of peace bloom in my chest, as the tension I carry in my heart loosened and I found myself able to simply breathe.
That feeling, that sense of relief, the feeling that one has the space to breathe…that is where the work can happen.
I’d go even further: it’s not just having the space to breathe, it is the permission. Somehow, at some point, it can be easy to forget that we are human, and that we exist in a world of realities both simple and complex. The complexities are the easiest to confront, if only by recognizing their easy messiness. It’s the simple realities, the everyday, quotidian things, that can be easy to overlook.
Ours is a world of time. We exist in the flow, a flow we cannot change no matter how we experience it. Ours is a world in which we have to breathe, because without breath we die in a million different ways. And ours is a world in which we inhabit our bodies, for better or worse, no matter the shape or size. While we can change some facts of our lives, we still exist in these simple truths, these base realities, and trying to exist above them is simply flavoring denial.
Time. Breath. Bodies.
Repeat.
MetaFrizzics 