The closer you are to danger, the further you are from harm

WARNING: this reading discusses mental illness and suicide. 

Yesterday I ran a marathon. It wasn’t a sanctioned race or anything I had just set the goal in mind for early December but was feeling particularly good this week so I just went for it. Luckily, running for so damn long gave me plenty of time to really think about why the hell I was running for so damn long. Moving in certain ways in beautiful places is entirely different than running on suburban rail trails and roads from Abington to Hanover and back a few times. The scenery is underwhelming; there are almost always cars to contend with, and the action of road running on a nearly flat straight stretch is just a touch above mindless. Why do this at all then?

Unbeknownst to me, earlier in the week a close friend of a close friend of Candace’s committed suicide. Even earlier in the month, while handling lifters at our powerlifting meet, we discussed (coincidentally with a volunteer that used to run marathons) “touching the void”. How these great physical acts either ego driven or ego killing put us in a state that is much closer to one of life's great mysteries: Death. I am not making the conjecture that anyone who runs for a long time or lifts heavy things is suicidal; it is not that straightforward. Somewhere in all of us we want to know what it’s like, to be not alive. It is a universal truth, that we all die. Something we will all experience and something which we are all equally uncertain. Some of us cannot be bound to tolerate this life anymore and that curiosity overtakes us. These actions feel like what we imagine death feels like, a loss of self, an extreme shortening of our surroundings to what is immediately in front of us or inside of us. We almost stop being a person as we’ve understood what that has meant.

I can’t speak on behalf of the aforementioned self inflicted loss of life, but I can speak for myself. For a long portion of my life, these activities brought me closer to something that on occasion I deeply wanted. I learned however that I could use them to navigate that want. To touch something I was equally afraid of and curious about and come back to the other side still breathing. When we set out for a task, emotionally, we only have what we take with us. Negative thoughts and emotions work both ways from external goal oriented view points. Positive thoughts and emotions do the same. I am not sure that this relationship has been healthy, although it feels much healthier now than it has at any point in my life I can remember. However the truth that I have found and observed is that these confrontations are not simply limited to when we decide to run a marathon or just to swamp caves on Dagobah. For those that face the illness of despair, it can come at any moment and with many faces. Some require you to be confident in yourself, some require you to love yourself. The more times we confront them on our terms in safe planned environments, the better we are to live with them when they come. So maybe I’m not healthier for all this suffering but I surely have learned to find value in all of it, after all, the closer you are to danger the further you are from harm.