You fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way
Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then the one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in the relative way, but you're older
And shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the [human] way
The time is gone the song is over, thought I'd something more to say
____________________________
Running in 105 degree heat at night can do more to your psyche than just about any ingestible chemical can. The place my mind goes 6 miles into a 10-mile-run in 100 degree weather at 9 pm can get pretty strange.
Time seems to be the valve, while heat is the force. Think a steam engine: wood or coal stoke the fire to burn hot enough to power the engine along. Time is the tracks, I am the engine and the heat is, well, the heat. (I'm going off the rails on a crazy train sums it up ...)
Anyway ...
As I was researching, there seems to be two distinct viewpoints on time. One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence. The opposing view is that time does not refer to any kind of "container" that events and objects "move through", nor to any entity that "flows", but that it is instead part of a fundamental intellectual structure within which humans sequence and compare events. The main reference for my experiences stem from the latter. A place where man-made time (seconds, minutes and hours) don't matter, only natural time (days, months and years.) Through this time portal, I can visit the past or future all within the present moment. And I do. A lot.
Sometimes I am transported to the past, visiting old memories and conversing with ghosts and skeletons given artificial insemination by the great secretions of the pineal gland, that ancient mystical well of universal consciousness. Old mistakes, regrets or misdeeds, reminders of a less then human existence. Other times I am thrust into grand portentions of a glorious future where wealth, wisdom and power are bestowed upon me for daring vigilance in the throes of battle with the dragons and demons of fear, doubt and other spells cast by the great wizards of the depths of the void of awareness.
Sometimes I just have bad gas.
I never know what I'm going to get, which is the great part about running in the heat late at night.
Sometimes I creep myself out. Like the time I was running and all of a sudden I got the chills and felt like the spirit from 'The Grudge' was chasing me. Man, that was really bad. It felt like the time when I was surfing up at Moonstone Beach in Humboldt County and all of a sudden had the thought that there was a shark under me. Once that thought came, I had to paddle in and stop surfing. Except, when your running and your a few miles from home, you just have to run the fear down. There's no where to hide. You HAVE to face the fear.
Usually, the experience is an ecstatic one, meaning a state of overwhelming emotion, like a rapturous delight. And, as in my past blogs, it is triggered by a song I am listening to. I have those time twisting hallucinations quite a bit. A few times I have even gone a few miles only to realize that I was so entranced that I forgot I was running. Those are the days I like the best. My run workouts seem so short on those days.
These experiences are truly why I run. Don't get me wrong, I like the health benefits and the quiet, introspective moments I get. But the truth is, I really like the mind-blowing, bizarre trips I get to experience. My runner's high ... running truly is a psychedelic experience for me.
So these thought were what I was thinking about last Sunday night on my long run. Well, that and the UFO I think I saw. But that's for another blog.
Happy trails and purple hazes,
Eric
Those who control the past control the future.
Those who control the present control the past.
My friend Ed is running the Ironman with me and is raising money for a local charity called the Tempe Community Action Agency. If you can help in anyway, that would be awesome. Here is the link:
http://edtheironman.blogspot.com/
http://edtheironman.blogspot.com/
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