On running | TheArticle

The 17th Century mathematician and devout Catholic Blaise Pascal famously said that the miseries of mankind derive from the fact that we have forgotten how to sit alone in a quiet room. I

disagree. I think much of our misery can be traced to the fact that we are not (physically) active _enough_. Like many of us I am under house arrest, save for the hour a day that Matthew

Hancock releases me into the exercise yard. I use those 60 minutes to run. It is in running, not in sitting still, that we can unlock the spiritual resources that can carry us through the

current misery. In his book _Running with the _Pack, the philosopher (and runner) Mark Rowlands argues that the activity of running has a lot to tell us, both about what we are and how we

should think about the way that we live. There is a _phenomenology _of running, a “what it is like”, which discloses clues as to how the human animal and the human person fit together —

which for philosophers is probably the biggest puzzle of them all. Are we minds (or souls) contingently trapped in physical bodies? This was the view of Descartes (who, incidentally, was an

occasional visitor to the home of Pascal’s parents), and it seems to be one which Rowlands endorses (in this context at least): when he runs, he tells us, he senses that his “thinking self”

asserts its independence from his “bodily self”. Indeed, he argues that the former somehow (and this interaction is mysterious on the Cartesian view) tricks the latter into running on

through the pain and distress which are the inevitable currency of any run lasting more than about 30 seconds. I don’t draw the same conclusion as Rowlands, in part because my own experience

of running tells me something very different: that I am not a self, trapped in a body, but an _embodied self,_ which is very different. My existence as a thinking, conscious thing and my

existence as a physical object are, it seems to me, _essentially_ co-instantiated. The act of running intensifies an awareness of an essential underlying unity. This is the Aristotelian

picture: the view that the soul is the “form” of the body. The importance of _embodiment _to our status as persons is something I understand as an abstract fact when I am sitting quietly in

a room by myself; it is something I know vividly and immediately when I am on the run. The act of running supplies an epistemic re-evaluation of a fact I am used to knowing in a different

way. Rowlands and I draw different conclusions from what I assume to be the same types of experience (the experiences with which, as runners, we are both familiar). We are closer together on

the issue of what it can tell us about what gives value to life. Most of the things we do are for the sake of something else: we work to get paid to pay the rent. When we ask: “what is the

value in doing _this? _“, we usually say that doing _this _is useful because it helps us get _that_. And so on. We live our lives in a bondage of instrumentality, and questions of ultimate

value are perpetually deferred. But there are some things which we are motivated to do purely for the “purpose” of doing them, and which therefore carry a value that is internal to

themselves. Running, when done for its own sake, is one such thing. It addresses the restlessness that St Augustine said was wired into every human heart, and dimly intimates the existence

of values which might becalm us, if only temporarily. There is an obvious objection here, which is that running is often _not _an activity done for its own sake at all. People run to lose

weight, to battle addiction, to live longer, to fight stress, to get away from the kids. Running can be, in other words, an instrumental means to some other benefit. But it need not be, and

ultimately probably should not be. True, there are people, some of them friends of mine, who will not start to put one foot in front of the other until they are sure that their GPS watch is

properly calibrated. For some of them the evening club run is reducible to the stats they post on their Facebook page when they get home (they are the running world equivalents of people who

post pictures of what they are about to eat). They have permitted the contagion of instrumentality to break through and rob their run of its essence. And what is that essence? Simply this:

when you get down to it running is a form of play, and the tragedy of modern life is that we have forgotten how to take play seriously. Not for the first time, the ancients are ahead of us

here. Plato noticed the serious play of children and this is the point: that when we transition from childhood to adulthood, we forget how to do things merely for the sake of doing them.

Loss of childhood innocence involves a loss of wisdom. There is a sense of this in the gospels when in Matthew 18:3 Jesus tells his followers that in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven it

is necessary to become once again like a little child. We must, in other words, give up the mind that has been shaped by the exigencies of the world and attempt to reinstate the mind that

finds intrinsic value in simple acts of play. Maybe it is in the rhythm of the run that we can come to remember how to play again, and to effect the radical change of mind or _meta-noia_

(the Greek word we translate as _repentance_) that Jesus urged on us. It certainly will not happen just because we decide to sit by ourselves in a quiet room. Perhaps it is in the rhythm of

the run, when running for its own sake, that we might find one tool for the transformation of mind that Jesus urges on us.