No Pain At All

I hate running. I start out fine, jog along a bit. But then after about a minute my body is going, Whoa, what’s this? Why are we running? Then my lungs kick in and breathe hard and ask me what the hell I’m running from. There a tiger or something? We don’t see no tiger! Come on, slow down! I have to smack ‘em and say Shut up! It’s for your own good! I keep going, pound pound pound on the pavement, and they grumble and kick into gear, but they’re not happy, not happy at all.

Neither am I. People are driving by in their nice comfortable cars and here I am, running, breathing hard, feeling that prickly sting that precedes a sweat breaking out, squinting in the sunlight. It sucks. I wanted to sit at my desk and eat Oreos and get more work done or maybe look at blogs or the news or maybe even write something, as if. But no, here I go, running from nothing.

But I catch a second sort of wind and though I know it’s only because I’m going downhill, it’s a long gradual downhill and I’ll take the sense of relief however false. Down we go, gliding a little bit. Sidewalk, gutter, bare earth, a footpath between the pebbles. Tempted to speed up but I’ve already learned that if you go downhill too fast, you are burning energy you are really going to miss when you are going back up. So take it easy, bend the knees, use the old leg muscles to keep hip bones from pounding into each other, it’s what they’re there for.

Nice day, a little cloudy, humid. Run alongside my good friends the piles of rocks. An obscure history is encoded in their piles and ridges, a very, very obscure history. But there is history, some sort of tale, in everything touched by Man. Everything mattered, if even for a day, an hour, it mattered to someone once.

Minor pains, in that toe, in the other knee, a little twinge at the lower edge of my back. All right, don’t run that way. Use muscles to run some other way. It’s all good. Keep on going. Pain is not good, by definition, but if you have it and you can manage it, it becomes just another part of the experience. There can even be pleasure in pain, because it reminds you that you’re—

At the base of the steep weedy slope, next to the roadway, a white cross, set in the hard ground. A white wooden cross with a team picture pinned to it, class pictures, graduation pictures. Plastic flowers, necklaces, jewelry. Pens, inscriptions, “I miss U”, little hearts. Hat pins, a shirt. Candy wrappers. A small stuffed animal.

A small stuffed animal.

I keep running, pound pound pound. There’s no pain in it. There’s no pleasure in it. Just running and being alive. Being alive because no matter how much pain there can be in being alive, I owe feeling it and experiencing it to anyone who’s in a place where there’s no pain at all.