Most of the things that we do every day stem from the need of doing them. You brush your teeth becos you need to brush them. Otherwise, they would be smelling badly and you will have repulsive odour that you may not like in the first place.
But doing such things are only hygienic in nature. They make our living easier. But they don’t make our life. Imagine telling that you spent your life brushing your teeth every day for 2-3 times a day.
I mean who does that. Still the irony is we are doing exactly the same while we don’t realise that. We are busy putting food on our table for ourselves and our family members.
Most of the things that we are driven to do come from the need to do them. And the irony is we end our lives just doing that – getting hygiene in place. If I go back in time and try to recollect what drive me this far, then I would be compelled to say that I always my survival at the back of my mind.
Whether I went to a particular school, college or took up a particular job, it was never about what I liked to do or finding that out or pursuing something novel and engaging. But, it’s been a superficial one figuring out my survival out of them.
Running changed me all that for and that’s why I am putting this post here. While I started with the idea of need to run. When I started to run, I was compelled to do so because I wanted to improve my health Andi found running easiest thing to do for my health and fitness.
The idea came from the days when I would go to the gym to build muscles so that I could impress upon the girls around me. And would end up on tread mill running as a warm up exercise.
You never how far you have come in your understanding and maturity until you do the same thing several years after and surprised to find something totally unique about it. That’s what I found in running.
Running has shown me more about me than I would have ever known about myself. It has become a tool of self awareness. In those days of initial runs, I would spend a lot of time ruminating over thoughts that troubled me. My relationships, my work and the tragic events that unfolded one after the other.
While I ran, I felt that I could talk to myself so well and get to the core of the things that would be otherwise impossible. As you run, your brain gets the fresh doses of oxygen cells and floods the brain with so many positive chemicals that you are stimulated to find the good even in the most miserable circumstances.
I was living alone then lodged in a small lodge with just few things around me. And as I had nothing much to do but to work and come back to this 10×10 room fitted with a tables, chair and a bed to sleep. That’s it.
Running became my companion. I would go for run for 2 hours and again I would hot the well lit ground in the evening to plug my ear buds and listen to music and musings from several of my favourites on YouTube. Running turned me into to a human I should say.
I started to enter into a zone that I would call living and not just maintaining my hygiene of life. Suddenly, I saw the time clock allowing me to do what I was truly, madly and deeply in love with – RUN. I found the ways and means to find out the various running events and went there and participated. I saw no one or nothing came in between – my family, my kids, my job, my clients. Nothing at all.
People would like to call it passion but I would like to leave it as it is – a feeling to be felt. When you term a feeling into a word, you limit its meaning. An act could be just a simple mechanical thing for one person while it may turn out to be a life transforming and character building exercise for another. The latter is what happened to me by running.
And guess I still feel the same after running for the past 6 years. As I think of my tomorrow’s morning run, it fills me with the same romanticism that I would experience while I was in the nascent stages of my running when I knew not what a marathon would be all about. I was just trying to hit my 2 kms and aiming to graduate to 5 kms.
I hope you would take a wild guess out pf the post to understand that life is way more than simply doing the chores and calling it living. Do something that fills you with energy and enthusiasm. Then, you would be able to call your life – a life!
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