Long Distance by Bill McKibben
Glory of all sorts wears off quickly – by afternoon the morning’s fine book review has receded toward the back of your mind. So you’ve either got to arrange for regular triumphs or learn to enjoy instead the long slog that keeps you in the game.Other things wear off as well. At the moment my father died, it seemed impossible that the emotional power of that moment, the overwhelming sense of life’s fragility and urgency and beauty, would simply erode. But of course it did – that’s how we’re built. I missed him, sometimes acutely, but he was vanishing into that hazy, slightly idealized world where people go when they die. I didn’t want the lessons he’d taught me to go with him.
Most of long chain gurus, cranks and messiahs that have illumined human civilization have agreed on one point: that it’s what you do every day, day in day out, that forms who you are. Not what you do on special occasions. Clearly this was true of one’s physical life: You could go out tomorrow and force yourself to run ten miles, and if it was the only run you did all month, your body would not change at all (except that it would be very stiff and sore for a few days). It’s the long accretion of elevated heartbeats, of muscle-fiber twitches, of deep breaths that over time remake your plumbing, resize your lungs. And I knew from even longer experience that the same held true for intellectual life. Sudden flashes of insight might propel you forward, but hose sudden flashes only came to people who worked with consistent dedication to learn the new, to master the old.
What Dad’s death taught me, I think, was that the same holds true for the spiritual life, to use a grander term than he would have ever employed. People’s deaths often really do magnify who they are, intensify their essence instead of disguising it. His serenity and grace and egolessness were not sudden saintly touches applied with the strenuous effort at the very end; they were grooves into which his life had fallen by long practice of kindness and selflessness. Not in any dramatic way (or in his case perhaps any conscious), but instead in the simple daily encounter with those around him. That patient, unflashy drip drip drip of love changed him as fundamentally as (more fundamentally than) my patient daily drip of long slow runs. Occasionally real tests arise, times when you need to consciously and maybe painfully lay aside something you want to do in order for your spouse or your child to find their fulfillment – call those uphill intervals, wind sprints. You don’t want to do them, but you’re stronger because of them. And then there are the longer tests, more like marathons: sickness, depression, all the flavors of angst and ennui, all the sad temptations of hypermaterialsim and hyperindividulism. They are like the races, I suppose, calling for all the strength that daily habit has engraved in your heart. The most profound test, of course, is the last one, dealing with your death. But if you’ve done the training, the race will take care of itself – or so it seemed, watching Dad.
This metaphor is too grand, doubtless. Life as an endurance race. But what made this project so sweet for me was the dawning understanding that an endurance race, though tough, was also enormous fun. Even though it didn’t supply any of the things – comfort, convenience security – that our society trains us to want, it provided a much deeper joy. As does, I suspect , a committed life of the mind or of the heart. At any rate, I’d like to find out. Right now, though it’s time for my run.
~pg. 191-192
