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Belief, memory, fear – these things hold you back, weigh you down, stop you moving. And I need to get moving. I need to stop thinking about this stuff.
‘Think of it this way: you’re turning a flat road into an uphill climb. You should be turning it into a descent. Look at my feet. They never go past my waist. They only take little steps. It’s like I’m falling – see, that’s all running is, controlled falling.’
‘That road. I didn’t decide to run that far on it. It chose me.’
He realised that this resistance was like a shadow, and that the darker the shadow was, the brighter the light that shone. It was a part of me and it would always be with me. When it was at its strongest, when things seemed to be at their worst, that’s when the brightest hope could be found. I should learn not just how to fight it, he told me, but, like every enemy, how to love it.
‘God bless you’ and mean it quite literally, you commit to a wild insanity of faith. Say ‘no’ and you’re an atheist: confident, assured and certain of the scientific method and all of its own twisted ideas – string theory, infinite universes, emergent consciousness – equally strange, equally alien, each requiring its own version of that insane faith. I know now that it’s certainty itself I have a problem with. Certainty doesn’t feel like something we’re supposed to have.
Before the first step, before the first muscle twitches, before the first neuron fires, there comes a choice: stand still or move. You choose the right option. Then you repeat that choice 100,000 times.
A hundred thousand simple decisions, each one made correctly.
