ON BEING SANE IN INSANE PLACES

The weather this morning set conditions that were about as beautiful as you can get for a medium long run. Sunny. Around 14 celsius with no wind to speak of. The nights have been cool, so the leaves are starting to turn color, but just barely. There are lots of yellows, a few reds. The ground is still clear and the grass is green. Early Autumn.

The sunlight danced serenely in delicate patterns on the calm Lake Ontario waters, creating the impression of some far away planet, or at least, another, less polluted, less urban environment than where I really was.

It would be insane not to stop and notice all of this beauty. People speed by on the Gardiner Expressway, on their way to work. Crowded and hectic. Yet, it is quite empty on the Waterfront pathway. A few retired people. A woman with her new, smiling baby enjoying the sun.

Me, I am going back and forth in my head, between just wanting to enjoy the experience of running on such a morning, and looking at my GPS to gauge my performance (which I am not happy with, not having a stellar day). My self imposed peformance desires are polluting what could otherwise be a particularly pure experience. Given the night I just had on call, I should be happy that I am outside running at all (thank the Lord for Starbuck's and the Black-eye).

Then I passed by a young girl, who looked quite different than everyone else, and who brings me to the point of this blog. She was dressed in rags and tatters; lookng very much as though she had been sleeping outside, for a while.  Her complexion was ruddy and a bit soiled. She was carrying a large, canvass rudsack on her back, the kind you would have expected to see on a solider in the British army marching with on some colonial mission in the desert. She had that far away expression that one often sees on the faces of street people, that look right through you kind of expression that often means this person is seeing something you are not; whether you take that to be a kind of super-sensory perception or just plain lack of connection to reality is a philosophical question to do with what you consider possible in the universe and what not.

I thought about how, in my youth, I romanticized the notion of life on the outside, insanity, the way of the steppenwolf, the derelict. I remember a time, when looking ahead at what life might bring, at the things people did, the way they were, the things they valued,  the bizarre complexities of modern existence, that I thought to drop out and become insane was not only desirable, but the only sane thing to do...I don't quite believe that now.  And, by most definitions, I have failed to either drop out, or become insane.

Yet, I still feel that the world is insane. I participate, yes, but I object. There might have been a time when I was a participant/observer, but I have ceased with close observation. These days, I pay just enough attention to understand and be understood.

It dawns on me that living and training for an Ironman, is a bit insane from most people's perspective, and I agree. Yet, to me, it is also completely in synch with what I was put on this earth to do. Move, quest, struggle, adapt.

All this training means I am almost constantly on the outside of ordinary life. Ordinary life is a space I jump in and out of in between exercise sessions. If you do it enough, you lose a sense about which is prime and you just become a world-hopper. I kind've like how that sounds. I don't need to be in or out all the time. I hop around. I realize the essential insanity of all these spaces which i find myself in, and that realization keeps me sane.