Three things have dramatically impacted my philosophy on life in the past ten years: proximity to untimely death, running the Boston Marathon, and jumping out of a plane.
The other night one of my girlfriends posited it's impossible to truly comprehend missing something like one's health or a loved one until you've lost it.
I think we all have our own ideas of what counts as a defining experience, our own framing constructs for how we can make sense of the parts of life that are too big and too beyond us to ever truly know inside and out.
Anyway, I'm writing... morning pages, a revision of "the book," these blog posts, emails for work, and I'm looking at the writing I'm doing as exercises. An exercise in this or that... finding an arc, being concise, dialoguing in different voices.
It's a little bit aimless.
Less so when I sit down and type out a syllabus for myself - do this outline one week, edit that screenplay next month, write the book proposal by December, send out queries after the first of the year, and so on.
I just had this great aha moment though. The impulse to add up the number of training runs I've done vs actual half marathon and marathon races... The number of times I've run at least eight miles vs the number of times I've gotten medals for doing so.
10 halves, 1 Cherry Blossom 10 miler, 1 full.
12 medals, 5 times as many runs 8 miles or longer.
Gotta put the time in.
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