Practicing being present

Learning from Larry McMurtry + Vanessa Zeuisei Goddard

I hope you’ll be able to forgive me, as this post may jump around a bit from idea to idea, like a butterfly floating about from flower to flower. My mind has been a bit all over the place this past week, as I’ve been reading things from all over the map since I last wrote to you.

I’ve struggled with this state of mind for a while now; it’s the same thing I wrote to you about last year, when I described my love-hate relationship with social media. I don’t know if you experience the same thing, but lately I find it hard to focus for long on any single thing.

Of course, having to pay attention to so many things over the past couple of years hasn’t helped, especially with children at home during Covid. But also, I think, viewing the world through screens so much has imprinted itself on my conscious brain, which now is trained always to be on the lookout for the next thing that might capture my attention.

So it’s been a revelation this week to pick up a book that’s been sitting on my shelf for a few months now, Still Running: The Art of Meditation in Motion by Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, a New York City-based Zen teacher and writer whose classes and workshops focus on how to use running as a way to meditate.

As I’ve been reading the book’s early chapters, they feel so relevant to the conversations we’ve been having here recently, especially as we start the first two weeks of the training plan I shared with you last week.

A lot of us struggle with motivation. (I do too!) And when I think of that struggle, that’s exactly how I tend to see it: as a struggle. As something I need to muster up my energy to push through, to conquer, to overcome my internal resistance so I can somehow wrestle it to the ground, like Jacob wrestling with the angel.

That’s not how Goddard suggests we look at it, though — not at all:

“Each one of us goes through our days doing all sorts of ordinary activities: working, eating, walking, sleeping. Practicing these means engaging them with undivided attention — it means to ‘do what we’re doing while we’re doing it,’ as one of my teachers used to say — in order to see the nature of both action and doer.

Many runners run automatically. Many runners want to have finished running, but prefer not to be there while it’s happening. Both of these do a disservice to the runner and to running. I’d like to show that being present is much more fulfilling, enjoyable, and worthwhile…”

As she goes on to explain, she has come up with a variety of visualizations and mantras to help the people she works with develop an awareness of themselves “not just as physical beings, but also as emotional and spiritual creatures”:

“To me, this is an essential component of awakening: to gain access to the full range of our being so that we can live in harmony with ourselves and with one another. These practices are also meant to bring us into closer contact with the act of running itself, to help us run safely and effortlessly.

I call them ‘practices’ rather than exercises for three reasons: one, to stress the deliberate turning of our attention toward our bodies, our minds, and the act of running. Two, to move away from the limited definition of running as fitness training. When we see running solely as exercise, focusing on calories lost, pounds shed, and miles covered, we miss the deeper implications of this art.

And three, to point out that running — like any other discipline — is an activity that each of us must choose to continue over time. Each day we have to choose to run with the understanding that, as a practice, running needs to change as we change.”

I have to confess, I do exactly the thing Goddard singles out here. In fact, I don’t think it’s ever occurred to me to try to be mentally present when I run; when I run on the treadmill, I always distract myself with a podcast or music. And when I run outside, I’m often mentally somewhere else, or looking forward to the end of it (especially when the weather’s as hot and humid as it has been lately).

Being where I am — fully where I am, body and mind present together, not trying to be anywhere else — is something I haven’t tried in a long, long time. I’ve been buffeted about by the winds we all feel blowing through our world, yet it hasn’t occurred to me to stop and try to be still.

That’s what I think Goddard is getting at: using running as a way to experience stillness, to feel some freedom from the anxieties we experience, even if it’s only momentary. And when we do that — when we don’t judge the way our bodies are moving or how they’re performing, when we allow them to just be — running can become something else entirely, and we can leave the struggle behind.

Another book I’ve been reading over the past week is one I can’t get out of my head, because not only are the characters and the story engrossing, but the sentences are just so beautiful — Lonesome Dove, by the legendary western writer Larry McMurtry.

If you’re my age, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the 1989 mini-series based on the book; if you haven’t, the quick thumbnail sketch version of the story is this: Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call are a pair of aging Texas Ranger captains who drive a cattle herd from Texas to Montana, in the waning days of the Old West.

Though friends, the pair couldn’t be more different: McCrae is outgoing, garrulous, and a little like Tom Cruise’s Jerry Maguire — he never wants to be alone. Call is McCrae’s opposite in every way, a gruff, stoic, hard man who works from sun-up to sundown every day, and drives everyone around him to do the same.

What caught my eye about Call, however — and what’s relevant to us, I think — is McMurtry’s description of his need for solitude, early in the book:

“Call walked the river for an hour, though he knew there was no real need. It was just an old habit he had, left over from wilder times: checking, looking for a sign of one kind or another, honing his instincts, as much as anything. In his years as a Ranger captain it had been his habit to get off by himself for a time, every night, out of camp and away from whatever talking and bickering were going on. He had discovered early on that his instincts needed privacy in which to operate. Sitting around a fire being sociable, yawning and yarning, might be fine in safe country, but it could cost you an edge in country that wasn’t so safe. He liked to get off by himself, a mile or so from camp, and listen to the country, not the men.

Of course, real scouting skills were superfluous in a place as tame as Lonesome Dove, but Call still liked to get out at night, sniff the breeze and let the country talk. The country talked quiet; one human voice could drown it out, particularly if it was a voice as loud as Augustus McRae’s. Augustus was notorious all over Texas for the strength of his voice. On a still night he could be heard at least a mile, even if he was more or less whispering. Call did his best to get out of range of Augustus’s voice so that he could relax and pay attention to other sounds.”

There’s so much I love in this description, if nothing else in the way McMurtry uses language. But there’s also something there that echoes what Goddard is saying, to me at least — that we need spaces to go and get away, to hear “the country talk,” because the noise and the voices of the world we live in are so much louder. They drown it out, to the point we can’t hear it at all.

Running gives us a chance to be still, to go and hear those sounds, especially when we go outside and when we’re by ourselves. I’m going to keep this mind as I go out on my runs this week — following our plan! — and I hope you do too.

As always, keep in touch and let me know how things are, and how your running is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell

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Our training miles for this week

How did your running go over the past week? Especially if you’re following one of the training plans I listed last week, how did it go?

For those of you paying really close attention, you’ll notice this week’s plan is the same as last week’s — I like to give us time to ease into training, so that each week reinforces the previous week’s runs, and builds us up for the following week’s.

Here’s how our next week looks for the 12-week plan:

• Thursday, Sept. 8 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Saturday, Sept. 10 — 4 miles/40-45 minutes

• Sunday, Sept. 11 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Tuesday, Sept. 13 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Wednesday, Sept. 14 — 4 miles/40-45 minutes

And for the 16-week plan:

• Thursday, Sept. 8 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Saturday, Sept. 10 — 4 miles/40-45 minutes

• Sunday, Sept. 11 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Tuesday, Sept. 13 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Wednesday, Sept. 14 — off

And for the 10-mile training plan:

• Thursday, Sept. 8 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Saturday, Sept. 10 — 3 miles/40-45 minutes

• Sunday, Sept. 11 — 2-3 miles/20-30 minutes

• Tuesday, Sept. 13 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Wednesday, Sept. 14 — off

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