The Runner and the Creative Urge
I have said it before and will likely say it again, but I believe strongly that all humans are creative beings. This is not to say that all humans exercise their creativity or even recognize their creativity, but that the capacity to create is embedded inside each human self, not only a select few. It also goes without saying that such creativity, even if accessed according to its potential, would be lived out and expressed in a different way in every person, since no two people ever leave the same imprint on our earth.
What does all this have to do with running? In my opinion, the act of running is inextricably linked with the creative urge, the desire to create that dwells within the human soul. It may seem as though the two are on opposite ends of the spectrum. The former (the act of running) concerns the body: that is, the physical aspects of a person. The latter (creativity) instead revolves around the mind and the soul: the mental or spiritual domain. However, I think we enormously limit ourselves if we compel these different realms of self to abide in isolation. The diverse pieces of personhood (mind, body and spirit) were not intended to be self-contained, separated from one another in neat, compartmentalized boxes. Rather, they are blended and intertwined in surprising and unexplained ways, and only when they are permitted to fulfill their natural unity can the person truly experience a fullness of self. Thus, the way I see it, the physicality of running can lead very easily into the creative sphere.
In a world with an overwhelming emphasis on motion and sound, contemplation is a rarely sought gem. The problem is not that we are incapable of contemplation or that it is unavailable to us (though it might be harder to achieve in certain environments or if we are unused to the experience). I think the larger problem is that we do not recognize the value of open contemplation; we do not seek it all. This calls to my mind Neil Postman’s foreword to his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. In the foreword, Postman compares 1984, in which the infamous Big Brother monitors and controls the lives of citizens, to Brave New World, in which author Aldous Huxley depicts a very different kind of oppression:
“Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”
Perhaps it seems that this quotation has driven us far from our point as well (which happens often in my running posts). However, I couldn’t help myself from including it, since I think it is so relevant and powerful. Maybe the most terrifying development in our modern psyche is that we no longer feel the need for silence, for contemplation, for creativity. Maybe we have grown “to adore the technologies” that pervade our daily lives to such an extent that we do not even realize there could be something else, that a richness might come out of stillness.
Running, I think, is an activity (and a very active one at that, as we have discussed before) that brings us towards the sphere of contemplation. Sometimes we run right into it, unintentionally or by accident. And yet there is no denying that the creative urge can more easily surface when the mind has the space and the time that running (or something of a similar nature) gives it. As I run, I am in a sense freed from the typical concerns that dot my day-to-day existence. In that half hour of solitary, silent running, these concerns are even unveiled as trivial and unimportant. And while I engage in physical exercise, I engage with my mind and spirit as well. They come together in a beautiful harmony, a unity that unfolds to me the deepest realization of my self. This is one of the reasons why I find running outdoors infinitely preferable to running on a treadmill in a gym.
Sometimes it only takes this small and seemingly insignificant amount of time to recapture a spirit of contemplation that will then come with me on the rest of my travels over the course of the day. We are all creative, and creativity comes from the unity and wholeness of self, from some sort of connection to our origin as beings created by a Creator. Yet we need to allow ourselves the opportunity to discover this aspect of ourselves, without the expectation that it will bear a particular fruit or come to fruition at a particular time. We need to recognize that contemplation is a good which must be sought, and that the voice of the creative urge within us is only ever stifled or suppressed, but can never (no matter how hard we may try) be extinguished or entirely silenced.