Chicken in Galoshes
Occasionally, a non-running friend will ask me what I think about when I run. There’s never a quick and easy answer to that in part because there are long, beautiful, blissful stretches with no thinking whatsoever and in part because the pathways in my brain opened up by a run have very little resemblence to what most people call “thinking”.
My run this morning started out, as many do, with a simple “aaaaaaah” sound filling the empty spaces in my skull. It’s a uniquely satisfying sensation to feel your brain uncramp at the same time your lungs fill with air. Aaaaaaaah. The next “thoughts” are more along the lines of the body asserting itself and wanting to record feedback. Ouches or hissing sounds may fill thought space as the physical elements that aren’t quite aligned on any given day make themselves known. There are some glorious sensations that assert themselves into full conscious recognition too – the feeling of cold skin warming up with bloodflow, the tingling of muscles remembering what to do, the unintentional acceleration that’s the runner’s equivalent of a hungry woman gobbling food. As the run begins to unfold, thoughts range from ”mmmmmh – nice” to “wheeee!” to “WUHOO!!!” And they’re still not thoughts exactly, more just impromptu expressions of apprecation as the body finds itself completely in charge for the only time all day.
On a good day, this is where conscious thought stops for a little while. You notice things such as wildlife, wind on your face and random human drama, but none of it engages you enough to get a train of thought rolling down the tracks. I suppose if you were of a New Age persuasion, you’d call this “being in the moment.” That description of this kind of awareness is a bit like saying chocolate is sweet – we all know what is meant, but it doesn’t describe anything at all. I’ve heard the term “Zen Runner” quite a bit lately and that touches on it, but what we’re really talking about here is a nice little slice of time outside of time when the word Nirvana is fully understood through every cell and every fiber of your being. It’s heaven on earth, reunion, you name the spiritual target – that thought-free zone is IT.
There is actually a time during a run when loopy little daisy chains of thoughts start forming, but they’re not linear and because they’re springing out of that nice Zen space, they’re not coming from ego or conscious self. It’s all random association and processing of whatever flotsam your subconscious feels like tossing to the surface that day.
Between 11:30 on Saturday night, Alaska Standard Time and 4:00 on Sunday afternoon, Eastern Standard Time, I travelled approximately 3,630 miles, and that would be just the air miles. I get a few bonus miles for the mad dashes from terminal 1A to terminal 3X on those funny moving walkways that are an invitation to vertigo. In those miles, I flew into the dawn and then back into a sunset. I flew through two snowstorms and a thunderstorm, over big cities, mountains and open fields. I sat next to a cast of characters that could easily populate a sitcom for several hit seasons. Where I’m heading with all this is that over the course of a journey so long, you experience a great deal and yet life moves so quickly that pausing to actually understand or appreciate any of it is a near impossibility. I think this really started to sink in on the shuttle to the hotel where I was seated with a group of private jet pilots who were talking about flying one of their CEO’s into Haiti. Hearing what they had witnessed and experienced as we watched the perfect suburban homes in White Plains roll past the windows was almost more of a disconnect than my poor exhausted psyche could tolerate just then.
The thing about the run, though, is that I don’t think about the plight of people in Haiti while I’m running. I think about chicken in galoshes so that my heart has room to hold the people in Haiti.
Back up a sec. Chicken in galoshes?
One of the stops on my trip was a meeting where I got to hang out with a bunch of computer geeks. I’m not talking about system admins here – I’m talking about the people who don’t show up on any contact or distribution list, the ones we refer to when we cop out and say “no promises, but I’ll talk to the developers about that.” I actually feel a little tingle of privilege and honor that I know the names of some of these people without names.
So our work group was chewing away at a problem that involved some sticky bits of business process, some interpersonal and systems interfaces that either don’t exist or don’t work and to make matters worse, no one at the table was even speaking the same language. At the point it became clear to me that we were all talking about the same thing but using different language to describe it, I had to say something. ”Hold on!” I said. “I think we’ve got the classic problem with the three blind men and the elephant.” One of the developers jumped right in: “No, it’s way worse than that, it’s chicken in galoshes.” Huh? Come to find out that what he meant by that is that the object of our study was in and of itself absurd, making any of our assumptions or discussion about it yet further off the mark.
So here’s the problem with chicken in galoshes. I invite you to imagine a chicken in galoshes. Now see what I’ve done? It’s like a song in your head – you won’t be able to rid yourself of the image now. The only hope is to replace it with a different chicken in other shoes. Worse? Could be, just like the endless croon of Barry Manilow replacing the sickly sweet of Donny and Marie.
The thing about imagining a chicken in galoshes is that it so perfectly expresses the utter absurdity of any given day in the life of…who? You, me, Aunt Martha? The phrase and the images that flow along with it, though are the perfect expression of both what I think about when I run and why I do. A random thought or image can take miles and miles to unwind and in those miles lies the temporary release from all the very real troubles in the world. We need a break from them, I think, to restore our full compassion and humanity. Chicken in galoshes could well save the world – it’s really no more absurd than some of the other strategies we’ve tried.
