“The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast, and you miss all you are traveling for.”
No matter what day of the week it falls on, the first day of the year is one I almost always experience with a feeling of liftoff. Like a plane taking off into the air, first with nose up and then landing gear up… and then off we go.
What happened the year before, whether it was good or bad or meh — whether I feel like I achieved anything worthwhile or not, all that gets swept away. The first of January is a blank slate, a new beginning. Anything is still possible, you know?
Before that plane can take off, though, it has to land and hang out at the airport for a while. It needs the passengers it’s carrying to disembark, to take their baggage with them, and to go rest in the hangar for a while while it undergoes maintenance and refuels.
That’s kinda how I’m feeling right now with running, and with everything. I didn’t chase a big goal this year, but I did have a goal: the PNC Atlanta 10-Miler, back in October.
But now that we’re already in mid-November — and this may be hard to believe, but there are only seven weeks left in 2025 — it feels like the right time to shift gears and slow down, to pace myself as we head into colder weather and shorter days.
Downshifting doesn’t have to be only be a time for relaxing. (Though that’s what I like about it the most!)
It can be a time for change, too.
A couple weekends ago, my family and I traveled from where we live in Atlanta to a small town in rural Georgia, about two hours away. One of my dad’s cousins, whom we got to know well growing up, was turning 90 and celebrating her birthday.
I’ve made this drive a thousand times, at least the stretch along the interstate out of Atlanta. It has a different look every time I drive along it; there’s always some new piece of the highway being built, some new exit ramp or bridge going up.
Once you turn off the interstate, however, and onto the back roads that lead south from it, you’re in a different world. From the one I live in, anyway, with its gleaming corporate office towers emblazoned with names like Google, Microsoft and Coca-Cola.
Along these back roads you’ll see nice, well kept estates here and there. But they alternate with dilapidated old farm houses, their paint peeling off in the sun as kudzu vines slowly swallow them up.
We visited this town about once a year when I was growing up — sometimes less, sometimes more than that. Back then, we’d go fishing, we’d go climbing on the giant boulders out in the wide-open fields on my great uncle’s farm. We’d chase each other running around the dirt roads, stopping only to climb up in the hay barn (and nearly fell out of it once or twice).
Those places are all still there; they’re largely the same. But aside from a single new road that was under construction, almost nothing had changed from what I remember growing up.
Downtown stores still stand empty, many boarded up. Nothing new has gone in them, even all these decades later. And while a couple of new schools have been built, there’s been virtually no development — most of the land in the county is unused, even after all these years.
Now, there’s plenty about this place that’s wonderful. It’s peaceful, and it’s quiet — when you’re there, you can feel the tension you absorb from living in the city fall away. (And there are plenty of downsides to living where I live, of course; as one writer once described Atlanta, it’s a city “devoted to the worship of everything new.”)
From being there again, though, after all these years it dawned on me: change is a choice. The growth I’ve seen in the city where I’ve spent my adult life didn’t just happen on its own — people made it happen.
And the same is true of each of us, on an individual level. It dawned on me that whatever I feel I’m missing in my life at this particular moment, I’m not going to simply chance my way into it. I won’t just get lucky and stumble into it. (Or, at least it’s highly unlikely that I will!)
No, if I want to experience growth and change, those are things I need to make a choice about — and actively take steps to bring them about.
Even that may not be quite right.
Lately I’ve been re-reading a book we discussed last year, James Hollis’s Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life. The book’s subtitle — “How to finally, really grow up” — hints at why: I’m going to be 55 years old next year, and maybe it’s time to, you know, “really finally grow up”?
That sounds crazy, I know. I have friends who are already talking about retirement, which for them is just a few years off. (I have one who already has!) But I still feel the same I always have — the world still feels new, like I have so much to learn. How can I possibly be ready to be put out to pasture?
As Hollis describes it, the first half of life is for pushing, acquiring, forging — not just a material living, but our identities. This is when our ego is in charge — the part of us that’s motivated to establish our independence, to claim a piece of the world for ourselves:
“We can see that the agenda of the first half of life is predominantly a social agenda framed as, ‘How can I enter this world, separate from my parents, create relationships, career, social identity?’ Or put another way: ‘What does the world ask of me, and what resources can I muster to meet its demands?’”
Eventually, Hollis adds, our ego must let go of its grip so that our soul — our unconscious, our inner self — can take over. This begins a new phase of life that brings a lot of uncomfortable feelings; we can feel unmoored, like we’re in the middle of a river and don’t know which side to swim toward:
“In the second half of life, the worm turns, the agenda shifts to reframing our personal experience in the larger order of things, and the questions change. ‘What does the soul ask of me?’ ‘What does it mean that I am here?’ ‘Who am I apart from my roles, apart from my history?’”
Our ego will push back against the soul, Hollis says; that’s why transitioning from one phase of life to another feels so awkward, so uncomfortable. Like something’s wrong, or missing.
We have to learn to stop pushing, he adds, and allow the soul to do its work in leading us where it wants to go. That’s difficult, to say the least, and I wish I had an easy answer.
But also, right now I feel like I’m in a moment when questions are more interesting to me than answers. So maybe I don’t need the right answers right now, as long as I’m asking the right questions.
What about you? Is this something you’ve experienced? A “before” and “after,” when your life felt markedly different?
As always, I love hearing your thoughts and what’s going on in your running/life — let me know!
Your friend,
— Terrell