Ben Howard - All Is Now Harmed
My fear in lights
All I said comes home
I can't do this alone
Asleep inside
I was born to lie,
Now prove me wrong
Prove me wrong
“I just run. I run in void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
I wanted to start with those two pieces for a couple of reasons. First, All is Now Harmed has been playing over and over - both in my head and through the speakers in my tiny apartment - for the better part of an hour, and I believe Ben Howard has better captured what I intend to say than I ever will be able to.
The second, the quote from Mr. Murakami, is one of my favourites. As an aspiring running and novelist, his memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, has stayed with me since I first read it five years ago. The above quote has become famous among runners, Murakami attempts to answer the age old question: What do you think about when running?
I run to acquire a void... and I write to fill it.
I ran 15 kilometers on Sunday morning and I could not, for the life of me, tell you what I thought about as I passed the hour and twenty-five minutes underfoot. Running for me is a state of being: during that time, nothing matters but the feel of cement under foot and the power in my legs driving me forward. It's a type of peace that I have yet to achieve in any other aspect of my life.
However, writing is the opposite. When I sit down in front of my computer, or with paper and pen in hand, all of these emotions come bubbling to the surface. I process my feelings by writing them down. So when there's a lot on my mind and I just need to stop thinking, I run. And when I'm feeling too much, I write.
Today is a day for the latter.
Hold me in harms way baby;
All is now harmed.
Those two lines speak to me so vividly. The tension between wanting to be held and hurt by those you care about. The desire to be near someone, but the knowledge that the closer they get, the more painful it will be when they leave.
And most of all, the acceptance that the end is coming anyway: thundering toward you like a steam train, full steam ahead, the brakes are busted, but at least we'll go out with a bang.
And then there's that slim hope that maybe we won't go off the rails this time. Maybe we'll just keep on coasting forward forever.
The thing about running, and life, is that we're always in motion, moving towards something. Sometimes we might be running uphill, one of those calf-killers, uphill for a quarter mile or more, so steep we can't even see what's at the top and we don't know what to expect when we get there.
But we keep running, don't we?
And every uphill must end. Eventually we reach the peak and the line of the horizon stretches out before us and the incline didn't seem so bad after all, because look at this wicked view. And even if there is no wicked view or you reach the top of the hill only to find you're standing at the base of another: you're still moving forward.
Always forward.
Life is about progress, and each mile we run gets us closer to the moments that make life worthwhile.
So I guess that's what I came here to say: If I stop running, I'll stop living. And if I stop wanting to feel, even if feeling hurts, I might as well be dead. Even when running hurts, even when I hurt, pain means progress: it means we're on the cusp of something that really matters. So take a deep breath and see it through.
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running
and you think, ‘Man, this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The ‘hurt’
part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand anymore
is up to the runner himself.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
