Chasing Happiness

I have some friends...crazy friends...that are preparing to run a marathon in just a few weeks. They have been training for months. I never gave too much thought to why they ran, I just knew that they did, and that they were crazy. Running has given them nothing but grief. One of them has pulled a groin muscle so severely, she will sit on her couch in front of her family, and massage it with her electric "back massager"...While her are kids in the room for Christ's sake! Another has actually run herself into such a state of physical degeneration, that she limps everywhere she goes, hand on hip, moaning "oh, my aching hip". She is only 31. There are twisted ankles and collapsing arches and increasingly large thigh and calf muscles (although a very enviable reduction in body fat is also quite apparent). So, why, then? Of all the fun things you could be doing with your time (like poking out your own eye, shopping for shoes, or eating bacon), why run?

But I get it now. They run because it frees them from their lives. When they run, although they may have pain and suffering and anguish and loss, they are free. They focus on the thing that forced them to get up at an ungodly hour, lace up the Nikes, and run. For 12 freaking miles, no less. Sometimes it is easy to look at the life of someone else and think that everything is easy for them. "Oh, look", we think...Look at how pretty her hair is, look at how clean her house is, look how well behaved her kids are...What we fail to see is that nothing is easy for them. Nothing is easy for anyone. My crazy running friends have all had hardships in their lives. Some will talk about it, some wont. Both are okay. I have subjected them all to sharply contrasting periods of verbal diarrhea followed by stone cold silence...no e-mails, no texts, no calls. It's all pain, just the same, like a great equalizer between myself and my crazy, running friends. It may be death of a loved one, loss of a career, or the end of a marriage. And to run...to run as fast as you can, away from the pain...the things that are hard...even if it's only temporary, sounds like freedom to me. And later on, the physical pain is just another row to hoe in the eventual harvesting of happiness. We all have to run after happiness, it simply does not run to you.

I had dinner the other night with one of my crazy running friends. It was such a wonderful evening, very simple, very needed. And as I sat at the table and looked around at our two families, I thought, "this is easy, this is happiness". To look at my friend, with her pretty hair, her clean house, her well behaved children, you might think that her life is easy. But I know better. I know that she has pain and loss heaped upon her in ways that can be too much for one woman to take...Maybe that's why she runs, but we don't really talk about it. And that's okay, cause when I am with her, we don't have to talk about any of the things that are hard or any of the things that caused us pain. Sometimes we do, and that's okay too. As I scroll through the mental inventory of all the various and sundry things we talked that night, the thing that stands out the most was the moment when she asked me very simply, "how are you doing"? It was dark and I was tipsy, but I could see in her eyes that she really, really wanted to know. And it occurs to me just now that sometimes you don't have to chase after happiness. Sometimes it does run to you. Even if it has a severe groin pull...It still runs to you.