Taking Charge

I have a confession to make... revisiting a THM classic

Evening, friends! I’ve been having a bit of writer’s block lately, so I thought I’d share with you one of the best-loved essays here from the past couple years. It’s an essay I wrote when I was struggling with how to move forward, when I’d reached a crossroads in my own life. I feel like it still resonates with me now, even though I’ve moved on to a different place, as I still kinda feel the same way. I’ll see you with new thoughts very, very soon. Until then, enjoy — Terrell

I have a confession to make.

I’ve been in a bit of a funk. Not for any reason — or any reason I can put my finger on, really. Just, an overall feeling of something being not-quite-right, not quite enough.

I haven’t been approaching my running with the kind of energy and enthusiasm I’m used to. To be honest, I haven’t been approaching anything with the kind of energy and enthusiasm I’m used to.

Not that I like feeling this way; I don’t. But it just arrives sometimes, like a fog rolling in across a meadow. It seems like there’s nothing I can do to prevent it, and really no choice but to wait for it to subside.

Or at least that’s the way I’ve always handled it throughout my life.

But a time comes when you get tired of feeling that way, you know? When you don’t want to wait for the malaise to lift on its own. When you want to take the wheel of your own life back, and start steering again.

You may remember the 1990 Kevin Costner movie, Dances With Wolves. One of my favorite scenes comes in the first hour — of three; it’s a long movie! — when Costner’s Lt. John Dunbar has arrived at Colorado’s Fort Sedgwick, in what in the 1860s would have been the edge of the western frontier.

Things aren’t going well. He thought the west would be the dream he’d long imagined; as he told the army major who signed his papers to travel there, “I want to see the frontier… before it’s gone.”

Instead, life at the fort is a backbreaking day-in, day-out slog of trying to piece together some semblance of a shelter, while the kids from the nearby native American tribe steal his horse and he’s harassed again and again.

Finally, a light goes off in his head:

“I realize now that I have been wrong. All this time I have been waiting. Waiting for what? For someone to find me? For Indians to take my horse? To see a buffalo?”

We see Dunbar shine his boots and the buttons on his dress jacket; on his bed lies his journal, in which he’s been narrating the story we see on the screen. He picks at the lint on his jacket and brushes away the smudges.

And then we hear the lines that really speak to me, even now after all these years:

“Since I arrived at this post I have been walking on eggs. It has become a bad habit and I am sick of it. Tomorrow I will ride out to the Indians. I do not know the outcome or the wisdom of this thinking. But I have become a target, and a target makes a poor impression. I am through waiting.”

That moment comes for all of us at some point, right? When we’re just… done. With indecision, with doubt, with feeling less than. With whatever it is that’s been holding us back, with whatever has been keeping us from moving forward.

There’s another quotation I love that I’ve shared with you before in an old issue. (Though it’s been many years — I went searching in my archive for it but couldn’t find it, so now it exists only in my memory!)

It’s from a passage by William Hutchison Murray, a Scottish mountaineer and writer who died back in 1996 at age 83, and achieved worldwide fame for his books detailing his adventures climbing peaks throughout Scotland and the Himalayas.

In his 1951 The Scottish Himalayan Expedition, Murray writes of the emotional state — the fear, really — we all feel sometimes. He doesn’t judge the feeling, but he does point the way to moving past it:

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.

I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: ‘Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.’”

I love, love, love these words. They’re what I needed to hear as I write this to you, maybe they’re what I’ve been needing to hear for quite a while now. (Maybe you too?) We all hit bumps in our lives, we all drift sometimes. But it feels good to recognize when that’s happening and to decide to finally take charge of your feelings, your emotions, your direction in life, you know?

I think I’m finally ready to do that, after a period of not feeling that way for a while. The reason I wrote this to you tonight is that I’m writing it to myself in a way — so tomorrow, I can wake up fresh with a clean, blank slate.

Let’s go out there and get it together tomorrow, shall we?

As always, I hope you’ve had a great week and have gotten some great runs in — keep in touch and keep me posted on how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell