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No matter how mundane some action might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative, even meditative act.
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you start to think, Man this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The hurt part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand any more is up to the runner himself. This pretty much sums up the most important aspect of marathon running.
To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow. The problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed—and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage.
Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.
But I knew that if I did things halfheartedly and they didn’t work out, I’d always have regrets.
Not long after that I also gave up smoking. Giving up smoking was a kind of natural result of running every day. It wasn’t easy to quit, but I couldn’t very well keep on smoking and continue running. This natural desire to run even more became a powerful motivation for me to not go back to smoking, and a great help in overcoming the withdrawal symptoms. Quitting smoking was like a symbolic gesture of farewell to the life I used to lead.
them and you keep turning them down. I’m struck by how, except when you’re young, you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don’t get that sort of system set by a certain age, you’ll lack focus and your life will be out of balance.
The most important thing we ever learn at school is the fact that the most important things can’t be learned at school.
It’s pretty thin, the wall separating healthy confidence and unhealthy pride.
Fortunately, these two disciplines—focus and endurance—are different from talent, since they can be acquired and sharpened through training. You’ll naturally learn both concentration and endurance when you sit down every day at your desk and train yourself to focus on one point. This is a lot like the training of muscles I wrote of a moment ago. You have to continually transmit the object of your focus to your entire body, and make sure it thoroughly assimilates the information necessary for you to write every single day and concentrate on the work at hand. And gradually you’ll expand the
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Being young means your whole body is filled with a natural vitality. Focus and endurance appear as needed, and you never need to seek them on your own. If you’re young and talented, it’s like you have wings.
Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If
Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life—and for me, for writing as well. I believe many runners would agree.
The ones panting are beginners; the ones with quiet, measured breathing are the veterans.
As you age you learn even to be happy with what you have. That’s one of the few good points of growing older.
If something’s worth doing, it’s worth giving it your best—or in some cases beyond your best.
You have to wait until tomorrow to find out what tomorrow will bring.
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.
To tell the truth, I don’t really understand the causes behind my runner’s blues. Or why now it’s beginning to fade. It’s too early to explain it well. Maybe the only thing I can definitely say about it is this: That’s life. Maybe the only thing we can do is accept it, without really knowing what’s going on. Like taxes, the tide rising and falling, John Lennon’s death, and miscalls by referees at the World Cup.
Reaching the finish line, never walking, and enjoying the race. These three, in this order, are my goals.
But just as our consciousness is a maze, so too is our body. Everywhere you turn there’s darkness, and a blind spot. Everywhere you find silent hints, everywhere a surprise is waiting for you.
You’ve done everything you needed to do, and there’s no sense in rehashing it. All you can do now is wait for the race. And
for a marathon to mean anything, it should be fun.
What the world needs is a set villain that people can point at and say, “It’s all your fault!”
In most cases learning something essential in life requires physical pain.
“I’ve heard of making a garage out of a stable, but I’m the first man who ever made a stable out of a garage.”
And this boss? That would be none other than our old friend Reality.
You practiced as hard as you could in all that heat, didn’t you? If you can’t make this time, then what’s the point? You’re a man, aren’t you? Start acting like one!
What I mean is, I didn’t start running because somebody asked me to become a runner. Just like I didn’t become a novelist because someone asked me to. One day, out of the blue, I wanted to write a novel. And one day, out of the blue, I started to run—simply because I wanted to. I’ve always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I’m wrong, but I won’t change.
If there are this many visible parts of my body that are worse than normal people’s, then if I start considering other aspects—personality, brains, athleticism, things of this sort—the list will be endless.
I’m pretty tenacious. If there’s something I can’t do but want to, I won’t relax until I’m able to do
No matter how long you stand there examining yourself naked before a mirror, you’ll never see reflected what’s inside.
Things are going to be okay. Just keep swimming like this. Once I get the rhythm down, all I have to do is maintain
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
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.
