What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

by Haruki Murakami

Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.

That’s what schools are like. The most important thing we ever learn at school is the fact that the most important things can’t be learned at school.

Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness.

Even if there were two of me, I still couldn’t do all that has to be done. No matter what, though, I keep up my running. Running every day is a kind of lifeline for me, so I’m not going to lay off or quit just because I’m busy. If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I’d never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit. All I can do is keep those few reasons nicely polished.

Fortunately, these two disciplines—focus and endurance—are different from talent, since they can be acquired and sharpened through training.

I’m not a human. I’m a piece of machinery. I don’t need to feel a thing. Just forge on ahead.

In this state, after I’d passed through this unseen barrier, I started passing a lot of other runners.

The end of the race is just a temporary marker without much significance. It’s the same with our lives. Just because there’s an end doesn’t mean existence has meaning. An end point is simply set up as a temporary marker, or perhaps as an indirect metaphor for the fleeting nature of existence. It’s very philosophical—not that at this point I’m thinking how philosophical it is. I just vaguely experience this idea, not with words, but as a physical sensation.

No matter how much I write, though, I never reach a conclusion. And no matter how much I rewrite, I never reach the destination. Even after decades of writing, the same still holds true. All I do is present a few hypotheses or paraphrase the issue. Or find an analogy between the structure of the problem and something else.

It’s precisely because of the pain, precisely because we want to overcome that pain, that we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive—or at least a partial sense of it.

Your quality of experience is based not on standards such as time or ranking, but on finally awakening to an awareness of the fluidity within action itself. If things go well, that is.