Marathons and Sprints

The time has finally come to get rid of the running shoes I used in April 2005 to run the London marathon, and that I insisted to keep and use out of affection and nostalgia ever since.

When I took them out of the wardrobe and I looked at them it once again hit me what these shoes have meant for me.

I decided to run the marathon on a spring morning in Nottingham, after having gone for 'my first run in ages' with my colleague Claire and realising I could not jog for more than 5 minutes. I had always declared that I could not run to save my life and eventually I had turned that into a reality.

It is so true that we create our own world through language, by telling ourselves and others what 'we are good at', 'what we are crap at', 'what we can or cannot do'. We literally speak in or out our own limits.
By creating and reinforcing those limits we make them true.

And here I was, a healthy 25 year old who could not jog for a minute without having to deal with a myriad of physical and psychological blocks.

That morning in Nottingham I declared a totally different future, a future that I could not ever have imagined until a few seconds earlier. Just like that - I created the possibility of that future.

I would run the London marathon.

Training for the marathon was such a mammoth task 'for a bad runner' like me. It took everything I had. The biggest part was to learn how to think that I could do it. My body followed.
That 2005 winter I trained through the snow, through the long Saturday runs by the Thames in Hammersmith, through giving up a big chunk of my social life.  

The day of the marathon came and went. It was a great day.

So much has happened since that April 2005, and when I looked at those shoes for the last time on a Sunday morning in Sydney in August 2013 I could not help but thinking about the marathons and sprints of  life - of the great challenges we face or willingly take on to become better, and how this change sometimes happens at a sudden, sometimes it happens over time.

These shoes are like relics reminding me of all the extraordinary things that have happened and the adventures that are yet to come.

And Never Rain.

I guided you through fifty broken valleys,

pretending that I really knew the way.

We saw some rabbits eating bears and flowers;

and cats drinking sunshine and never rain.

You never looked surprised

                                        or frightened at those sights.

You never seemed to care for good and evil.

I found the shades too cool – the sun too hot.

Our breaths were weak and feeble -

the air a hazy stench of honey and rot.

Yet still we kept just walking,

in silence – or barely talking,

as though nothing could touch our lonely embrace.

As though nothing could quench our endless thirst.

We went through fifty valleys,

You and I, through fifty valleys,

our path barely defined

by loud church bells on a Sunday in Darlinghurst.

Piero Bassu, August 2013.

Coming from a place of 'can'

I have recently started distinguishing what I see as a fundamental thing when it comes to achieving a goal in life i.e. 'the place where you come from'.

What I mean by this is the backdrop to one's actions and intentions. Just like the stage and setting of a theatre production brings forth the type of play that stage is supposed to host, the background to our life ('the place where we come from') can determine what and how we achieve our goals, independently of the circumstances or challenges we face to get there.

This requires us to let go of our tendency to tell ourselves 'I cannot do that', or 'that cannot be done'. If we look long and hard into what makes us feel that way we might well conclude the most of the reasons we have come up with to corroborate some unmmovable axiom are full of crap.

If we create a different backdrop - a backdrop of 'can', we find that the things that happen within that space are geared up to bring forth that very thing that we feel we can do. The key thing is that this backdrop creates freedom. It frees us from micromanaging or worrying about the minutia of how those things need to happen, for those things can now happen in a number of ways, but each of these way still leads to the overaching result that we long for.

So, by looking at one area in our lives where we have attached a lot of'can'ts' and simply turning them into 'cans' we will find that our attitude (and hence actions) towards that goal will change.  This power is merely the fuel to get there, and actions are still needed to get there, however with no fuel we might not get very far at all.

Indian takeaway

I am just back from my first ever trip to India. It was a quick business trip to Mumbai and Chennai, and it all went very fast. It was a bit of a fishbowl experience : from airport to hotel to office and so on, gliding through the reality out there in the comfort of my company car, eating at nice restaurants and been looked after.

For someone who experienced India like I did it is quite hard to go past the chaos, the poverty, the traffic, the open air landfills, the divide between the rich and the poor, the tragedies unfolding in front of your eyes out of the window, out of the fishbowl. It is hard not to look the other way, and to some extent I did.

However, below the surface I sensed the charms of India that so many travelers talk about. I tried to understand what was that charm, where did it come from.

Was it the intoxicating mixture of colors, spices, chaos, untold history that I know so little about lingering underneath the surface? Was it that 'matter of fact' attitude about life that has gone lost in many other places? Or was it just being confronted with being closer to the core of humanity that attracts one so much - a glimpse into what being human really means and the realization to what extent sometimes we go to dissociate ourselves from that mess that somehow seems to always work out at the end.

The size of problems

I have recently come to realize that I used to spend an awful lot of time trying to eliminate problems in my life. Everything I did was geared towards having a life with no problems.

A lot of New Years resolutions are born in this space. Eliminating problems.

What if life is not about not having problems, but having problems worthy of our lives. We spend so much time worrying about crap that we never give ourselves the chance to try to solve the important issues that affect ourselves and the communities we live in.

So for me 2013 is not the year of no problems, is the year of things worth caring about.