Heading for the Undiscovered Country? Take water

Hamlet described death, or rather the place after death, as "the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns". (Let's not go into the fact that Hamlet's murdered father actually does return, albeit briefly, from such a place and gives a pretty hair-raising eye-witness account of it.) I myself used the term somewhat inaccurately in my "Meeting Yourself" blog entry in February to describe the experience of running beyond your limits and getting to know a new aspect of yourself.

Well, yesterday I felt as if I really were venturing into the undiscovered country, as I neared the end of my third ever 12 mile training run (in preparation for my first half-marathon - the Lichfield Half Marathon in May) and felt as close to weary death as I've ever got. The cause? Undoubtedly dehydration, stemming from:
(a) the 'dodgy tummy' (for want of a better euphemism) I had suffered off and on all morning prior to the run.
(b) the steadily increasing heat of the day (hardly the heat of late summer but I was slightly overdressed for the occasion).
(c) my stupidity in not carrying any fluids with me for drinking en route.

As a type-1 diabetic I always carry plenty of glucose tablets with me when running. I can just about stuff what I consider to be a life-saving amount into my belt before undertaking a long run. However, I hate carrying extra weight, especially in my hands. Also, as I'm now so used to running shorter 10ks, wherein fluid replacement is not usually necessary, I unthinkingly figure that a drink can wait till I get home. And yesterday's run must certainly go down as "unthinking".

I still maintain that long runs, fast runs, and races are ideal for 'meeting yourself', but I have no desire to meet myself as I was yesterday, especially at the Lichfield Half (luckily, at such events drinks are almost invariably provided). One's dehydrated self is no fun to be with. He or she takes no interest in the surrounding area; seeing only a pair of plodding feet and experiencing the outside world only as a distance to be traversed in order to get home. Conversationally, even with yourself, you're a write-off. All interesting problems and moral dilemmas are reduced to the desire to reach home.

If it happens to you, just get home and learn your lesson: next time you venture to the undiscovered country, take water.

Morality After Boston

I don’t know whether, in the aftermath of yesterday’s bombing of the Boston Marathon, our sense of morality becomes clearer or not. My initial reaction of revulsion - both at the human cost and at the very idea that someone somewhere thought this was the way forward – seemed to present morality in clear black and white terms: the bombing was about as wrong as you can get morally. It was indiscriminately destructive of human life, and young life at that. It was so incredibly sad. It was pointless. It was evil.

And those runners, organisers and spectators who instantly thought of others and who helped and comforted the wounded, despite the immediate risk of further bombings, deserve our total moral approbation. These are good men and women, showing true humanity, whom I hope I might emulate if ever I am placed in similar circumstances.

But morality cannot rest there. At its core morality is not about our yesterdays but what we should do right now, this moment. And right this moment, to use Obama’s words, there is a need to understand why. Yet the reason why is not clear at all.

Kant - we should remember - never asked why. His most important question, underpinning even his highest moral philosophy, was how ("How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible?"). ‘How’ gives us a clearer object to investigate. In the confusion ‘how’ gives us focus. 'How' allows means to be assessed relative to ends, but also subjects those ends to a fair bit of questioning too. "How", we must ask, "is your goal valid?" "It just is" is no answer.

So perhaps we too should ask how instead of why. Not just in the detailed forensic investigation now underway (and certainly not in the brow-beating sense of "How could we have allowed this?"), but much more fundamentally. We should ask how the perpetrator(s) came to view ordinary, everyday people as somehow being legitimate targets. To plant a bomb is an evil act, but the seed of such evil germinates in the failure to appreciate other people as real individuals, and instead dismiss them merely as an undifferentiated mass under the heading of ‘Americans’ or ‘Bostonians’ or 'Runners' or whatever category your cod philosophy suggests. Behind such indiscriminate evil there is always a superiority complex that pathetically employs such categories.

When it comes to questions of morality ‘how’ is more significant than ‘why’. In the end ‘why’ can only come from the mouth(es) of the perpetrator(s) and, to be honest, I do not want to hear their irrational rationalisations of why they did what they did. Naturally they will have their superficial reasons but nothing they could say would make their actions any less evil; it would only add stupidity to their enormity.

‘How’ stands a better chance of telling us what we want to know. 'How' might get us to the point of seeing how such people are created. 'How' might help us see how certain ideas can be used to reduce whole masses of real, individual people to subhuman categories ready to be slaughtered. Asking ‘how’ is what we need to do right now. And of course keep running.

Filling the Unforgiving Minute

Continuing the theme from my previous post - The Kinesthetic Life - I am reminded of how Rudyard Kipling described in his poem "If-" the effort of "filling the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run" and how this contrasts with how my children move around the game of Minecraft which they so adore.

In Minecraft my children seem able to traverse immense distances in the briefest times, pretty much by sprinting through the air, as the character above left is so helpfully illustrating. They inform me that this luxury is only usually available in 'creative' mode, and that in 'survival' mode their characters must cross computer-generated terrain, and might even become 'hungry' if they use up too much energy. Notwithstanding this, I feel that the game offers little resistance to their efforts. Unlike a piece of marble ready for sculpting it has no 'grain' with which they are forced to work, as Michelangelo was forced with his statue of David (above right). They want to build a castle in the air? The only thing stopping them is boredom, and possibly other on-line players who might want to destroy the castle because they too are suffering from the very same boredom.

The unforgiving minute, however, offers resistance every step of the way, and you know by the end whether you really have filled it with sixty seconds' worth of distance run. There is a 'grain' in the muscles that can be felt, and you must respect its contours and work with it if you want to achieve your aim during this minute and throughout your life.

At a low point during the Minecraft session today I switched the Xbox 360 off at the wall-socket and got my children into their trainers for a 1 lap run round the block - a distance of 0.8 miles but an 'ultra' for them. By the end my youngest complained of "two stitches" and also of coming last. I'm not cruel but I smiled and told him there's a valuable lesson concerning effort and result to be learned there, something that Minecraft certainly will not teach him in 'creative' mode. Indeed, for true artistic creativity there needs to be a resistant grain to work both with and against. If you don't believe me, just ask Michelangelo...