Finding Your Own Pace

With a little help from Thoreau

Earlier this summer on a trip with my family, I snapped this photo of a cow, perched high atop a mountain slope. We were hiking along a trail when we came upon it, part of a small herd of dairy cows all munching on grass, chewing ever so slowly as they stared back at us.

This one, though, was separated from the rest of the herd. She was up there all by herself, while the other cows were all clustered together closer to the trail. We could walk up and touch them, even; they didn’t seem to mind.

It was late June when I took this photo; since we’ve been back, whenever I’ve scrolled through old photos on my phone, I always seem drawn back to this one. There’s something about it I can’t put a finger on that pulls me in.

As I’ve learned since, cows are a lot like us — they socialize in groups, preferring to move about and rest together at the same times. They even have best friends they play, run, and scamper with just like we do, especially when they’re young.

In very real ways, they need the safety of the herd. Not just as protection from predators; they suffer psychological and emotional stress if they’re away from it too long. (Again, much like we do.)

But every now and then, you see one wander off and do its own thing, like this one. To be by itself and free from the herd, even if only for a little while.

A couple of weeks ago, I was finishing up my usual 3-plus-mile run at my favorite spot here in Atlanta for running — one of our Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area parks — when I noticed something odd.

I was done. I had sprinted to the finish line I set for myself, feeling fantastic and energetic. But when I looked at my watch, it reported back a pace about 20 seconds per mile slower than the last time I’d run there, just a few days earlier.

To myself I thought, “what the hell, man?!” (Just for a second, though; the very next moment, I realized how ridiculously vain this was!)

Turns out, I’d become anchored to a certain speed, a certain pace for myself that (apparently) I believed I should always be able to hit. No matter how I’m feeling that day, let alone that I’m more than a few years older now than when I first started.

Even as small a thing as this was, I didn’t want to feel out of step with the old me, or with the people I know who still can run that pace. I didn’t think I was like this, but there’s a little part of me that’s afraid to be out there on my own. Afraid of getting left behind.

And yet, there’s another part of me deep down that feels the same romance Thoreau surely felt when he first ventured into the woods on Walden Pond — that agrees wholeheartedly with the sentiment, “the only people who ever get anyplace interesting are the people who get lost.”

(Maybe that’s what I’m doing right now, as I write this essay to you 😉)

It’s important to remember that Thoreau didn’t stay out in the woods forever; after a little over two years of living in the cabin he built, he returned to civilization back in Concord, Mass.

The reason? To care for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house while Emerson traveled to Europe, but also maybe because he’d had enough. As he writes near the end of 1854’s Walden:

“I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”

That’s so interesting to me. If anyone in history could lay claim to throwing off the chains of their former life and striking out into the unknown, it’s Thoreau. And yet even he found it wanting.

We always live in that tension, don’t we? Toward needing the approval and acceptance of whatever group we’re a part of — the feeling of belonging — yet also wanting to strike out and find new ground of our own.

(Well, maybe some of us don’t; maybe some of us feel fully comfortable living at one extreme or another.) But for most of us, oscillating between them is something we do all the time, I would bet.

I don’t have an answer — in fact, I’m not sure there is an answer. Maybe it’s just a process. Maybe, like Thoreau also wrote, “one must maintain a little bit of summer, even in the middle of winter.”

I like that, I think. I’ll try — try — to keep it in mind. (Though I’m sure I’ll forget it and have to re-learn it again at some point!)

As always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going — and have a fantastic run out there today.

Your friend,

— Terrell