To Two Women At My First 5K

Traffic? How many people are running this thing? I’m directed to park near the back of the lot. The walk will be a good warm up, I think.

I’m alone. I’ve not yet picked up my bib number and didn’t know they would give me a huge bag of stuff that I have to take back to my car. Runners in loose shorts and technical t-shirts mill around. I’m trying to decide where the number goes: on my back? Front? Shorts? I have a timing chip I have to attach to my shoe and re-tying the laces is complicated. The race doesn’t start for another 30 minutes. Everyone knows someone.

My very first race ever. I was hooked.

As the area starts to fill up, I’m more and more boxed into a little space. A woman beside me is making tiny little hops up and down and she talks to her friend. They are talking shoes, Asics, specifically. They know the difference between model numbers. One says she’s a tester and is trying out the latest this morning. They notice I am wearing Asics, ask how I like them.

They ask if I’ve ever done this race and I admit this is my first one ever. If you ever went to a Grateful Dead concert and remember the first one you went to and people’s reaction when you told them it was your first time, then you know the look on their faces. It said, Oh, yes. You will love this. You’ve arrived. They talk about the course. We are running through the Cleveland Zoo. It’s hilly, they say, like that’s a good thing.

They talk breakfast and pace. One explains she’s spent the week determining her sweat ratio. They describe the races they have lined up for the summer, tell me the ones I should do, the ones to avoid, the ones to do next summer.  They talk about half marathons, but I am sure I will never run more than a 5K, so I stop listening.

We hear the emcee thank us for being there. There are some sponsors to thank and a reminder of what we are raising money for. The crowd pushes closer and the women turn to me and touch my arm. “Good luck! You’ll love it!” And then starting gun and they run away.

I looked for them afterwards, at the tables filled with doughnuts and bananas and Gatorade. All the sweaty, smiling faces. People already telling their stories about turns and hills and negative splits. Deadheads always looked so happy at the beginning of the concert, but at the end, it had faded. Here, runners were even happier, higher, than when they started. Some, in fact, just kept running, out of the zoo gates, past the parking lot and into the city of Cleveland.

To Making Sense

Because let’s be clear: you are made, manufactured, processed and constructed. You are created by whatever facts or views or experiential detritus we pick up along the way and use them as scaffolding, mortar, bricks, paint, wood to build you.

But we don’t think we do that. We say “make sense”, but only when it appears that we are not making it at all.

He’s 80-something. After a day mowing the yard, he decides this is too much. The yard is small, granted, and most people his age aren’t out there mowing and edging and weeding with the attention he has. But the time has come. And so he decides to buy a riding mower. The kind that will cut the yard in two turns. The kind they use out in the country. On acerage. “You know, we’ll do you yard for you,” I say. No, no. He wants to do it himself. He has to. It’s important. Today, I see him drive it out of the garage. Very shiny. He could do the whole block in the time it used to take him to do just his. 

Makes sense.

90 degrees and 74% humidity. I admit it’s hot but still, I refuse to turn on the air conditioning. I would sleep better. I would get more work done. I wouldn’t be so very slow. My family would be happier with me. They’d be smiling at me. Instead, we sweat.

All I can think of is winter. The one that just passed and the one that is coming. I don’t want to invite the cold any sooner and I won’t welcome it when it comes. I’m not into curling up under blankets and wool socks and mint tea. I do it, but it’s survival. I don’t miss the cold when it’s gone. I won’t turn the air on. I hope we melt.

Makes sense.

When Rainer died, people often told us “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.”

They thought that made sense, a kind of pat-on-the-spiritual-back, you-got-this. They’d follow it up with “Everything happens for a reason.” I never understood how these cliches were supposed to help make sense, even if I believed in God. Especially if I believed.

The scaffolding of reason and narrative doesn’t fit here and the effort to construct is inherently flawed. I learn to live with the nonsense, the un-sense, the complete lack of sense. It is the white noise that remains when everything else goes silent.

To Kandinsky’s Moment of Disorientation that Created Abstract Art

Kandinsky's "The Blue Rider." Before he made the leap to abstraction

He walked into the studio late, just to grab something on his way out. He wasn’t thinking about art, the empty canvas rolled in the corner, the paint on the table, the worry that kept him up last night that once he is finished with the piece he’s working on now, he won’t know what he will do next. Inspiration is both a matter of patience and effort. He was afraid he had little left of both.

Summer. Late-setting sun. A low window in the studio. He opened the door and on the ground, his box filled with tubes of paint. Next to it, a chair. The way the light hit them, he did not see “box” and “chair,” he saw “yellow.” He felt the space around the color as empty and the space in the color as full. He felt the weight of it all in his chest. When he glanced around the room, he saw the lines between the things disappear and the colors scored the evening.

Kandinsky's "Composition 2" often considered a turning point in his work and in abstract art

And then it quickly re-assembled. Easel (function), oil cloth (function), brush (function), vase (function). And me, he thought. Here, in this room. I paint (function). But is "painter" what I am? Is it what  I do, even?

Being human is more than the sum of our actions. He believed this. And if it’s true for people, it’s true for the world we live in, the world we love. And this is what he wanted to paint, not the visible: haystack, cafe scene in Paris, that beach in Southern France. He wanted to paint what was outside the visible, underneath the visible, deep within the visible: all the other ways we know the things around us, all the other ways we know ourselves.

He pulled out the color and painted the color, not the lines that contained the color. He composed more than he painted, harmonized more than blended, improvised more than sketched. He painted spirit to spirit, because if music, the very abstraction of sound, could move us closer to heaven, then color could do the same. Look at the greeen. Dream of the yellows. Study everything in the red. Let the blue speak. It has the voice of God. Wordless.

Kandinsky's "Composition X." He believed paintings could be composed like music.