Manipulating Circumstance

"Your life is the manifestation of your dream; it is an art. You can change your life anytime if you aren't enjoying the dream."
-Don Ruiz in The Four Agreements

Yesterday was a dreary day.

The fact that I have lost 3 unfaithful umbrellas to the weather of State College, PA illustrates the typical gloom that yuck-ifies our area. State College bathed itself yesterday in a familiar drizzle as I roamed the streets umbrella-less. My refusal to buy another umbrella in anticipation of it falling victim to more of Mother Nature’s abuse was actually quite “refreshing.” When other nice people see a soggy female strolling through the rain without protection, they usually offer their own umbrellas. This was very comforting. The intimacy of the umbrella is pretty wonderful — you are forced to share a tiny diameter with another human being, which usually only happens in a romantic relationship or in a street fight (in acting, the rule is if you get this close to someone on stage you either need to punch them or kiss them). But the umbrella requires neither situation; it just brings people together in order to achieve cooperative protection from an exterior aggressor.

The crappy day ended with a cathartic episode, however, because I felt that I needed to light a flame somehow. I spontaneously decided to do an intense outdoor track workout at 9PM in the rain. (There might have also been a little incentive to burn off the cheesecake and 3 cookies I had after dinner, but it was still spur of the moment).

If you have never done a track workout alone at night, I implore you to do so. Standing there by myself staring at the giant maroon canvas that was inviting me to clutter it with my footprints, I embraced the moment of solitude. No one was watching. There was a vague discomfort induced by the chill of the rain, but there was peace in the absence of comfort because it was my discomfort, and there was no one else to share it with.

There’s also something magical about running as fast you possibly can for an uncomfortable amount of time. I will do this on occasion when I feel overwhelmed or stressed under life’s many pressures (finals are coming up). As I gazed at the light reflecting off the puddles of water that had accumulated on the track, I let the frustrations of the week energize me in preparation for a speed-burst. Once I had gathered enough steam, I took off and ran as fast as possible for two laps, several times.

There is a source of strength in all of us that is just waiting to be tapped in to, and it often tastes the best when it is explored for absolutely no reason at all. I probably ran faster than I ever did during cross country season training last night on the track because I just ran for the hell of it. I was exhilarated by the rain, the darkness, and the peculiarity of my decision to run in those conditions.

Very often, there are circumstances like rain or stress that will bum us out, or make us want to consume massive amounts of ice cream and remain sedentary. But we have the ability to reframe each circumstance to make it work for us. In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James illustrates this concept beautifully in the opening chapter of the novel by portraying a scene where the characters move all their furniture out on to the lawn to create a new setting to dine in — an artistic way of demonstrating that humans control circumstance, and not the other way around. I’d like to do this more; it added some excitement to an otherwise lackluster day.

Being born to run means moving the furniture to the lawn and running in the rain because you can.

It means circumstance can go to hell.