And as I’ve followed this lifestyle, I get the feeling every day that my ability as a writer is gradually improving, and my creativity is becoming more secure and steady. Not that I can demonstrate this convincingly, with objective facts and figures, but I do have a strong, indelible sense inside me that this is what is happening.
But whenever I explained this to people, most of them never listened. In fact, most tended to scoff. Especially until about ten years ago, most people didn’t get it at all. Most people said something like “If you run every day like that, you’ll get too healthy and won’t be able to write anything worthwhile.” To make matters worse, in the literary world there was a tendency to flatly feel contempt for any physical discipline or training. Mention “health maintenance” and many people imagine some muscle-bound macho types; but regular aerobic exercise done to keep healthy and bodybuilding done using all kinds of equipment are two very different things.
For a long time I myself wasn’t exactly sure what it meant to me to run every day. If you run every day, then of course it’ll make you healthy. You lose fat and are able to have well-balanced muscles, and can control your weight. But as I run, I feel that’s not all there is to it. There’s something more important deeper down in running. But it’s not at all clear to me what that something is, and if I don’t understand it myself, then I can’t explain it to others.
Still, not grasping what it all means, I persist in my daily running routine. Thirty years is a long time. To continue one habit that long requires a great deal of effort. How have I been able to do it? It’s because I feel like the act of running represents, concretely and succinctly, some of the things I have to do in this life. I have that sort of general, yet very strong, sense. So even on days when I think I’m not feeling so great and don’t feel like running, I tell myself, “No matter what, this is something I have to do in my life,” and I go out and run without really ascribing a logical reason for it. That sentence has become a kind of mantra for me: No matter what, this is something I have to do in my life.
It’s not that I think running is a great thing. Running is just running. There’s no good or bad about it. If you think “I hate running,” then there’s no need for you to run. It’s up to each person whether they run or don’t run. I’m not advocating anything like “Hey, everybody, let’s all get out there and run!” On winter days when I pass groups of high-school students out on a mandatory morning run, I even feel sympathy for them, feeling, “Those poor kids, there have to be some of them who don’t want to be out running.” I really do.
For me as an individual, however, the act of running has its own significance. What I mean is, for me, and for the things I’m trying to accomplish in life, I’ve always had the sort of natural recognition inside that in some form or another it’s a necessary act. And it’s this feeling that always urges me on. This feeling is what encourages me to get out there and run today, even on freezing mornings and blazingly hot afternoons, even when my body feels dull and unwilling.
When I read those science articles about the structure of neurons, it convinced me all over again, that what I’ve been doing up till now, and the sensations I’ve had have been on the mark. What I mean is, I felt very strongly that paying close attention to what the body is feeling is, fundamentally, a critical process for someone involved in creative work. Whether it’s the emotions or the brain, they’re all equally part of our physical body. I don’t know what physiologists say about this, but to me, the lines separating the emotional, the mental, and the physical aren’t all that clearly defined.
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I say this all the time, so some of you might think “What? That again?”; but it’s important, so I’d like to repeat it here. I’m sorry if it comes off sounding overly insistent.
Novelists basically tell stories. And telling stories, to put it another way, means delving deep down into your unconscious. To descend to the darkest realms of the mind. The broader the scale of the story, the deeper the novelist has to descend. It’s like constructing a large building, where you need to dig down very deep for the foundation. And the more hidden the story you’re telling, the heavier and thicker is that subterranean darkness.
From the midst of that subterranean darkness the novelist finds what he needs—the nourishment needed for the novel, in other words—and returns with it to the upper regions of consciousness. And there he transforms it into the writing, giving it form and meaning. Sometimes that darkness is filled with danger. What exists there often takes on all sorts of forms in order to deceive people. There are no signposts, no maps. Some places are veritable mazes. It’s like an underground cave. If you don’t keep your wits about you, you’ll get lost, maybe unable ever to return to the surface. That darkness contains a mix of the collective unconscious and the individual unconscious, the ancient and the modern. We bring those back with us, without classifying them as one or the other, and sometimes that package can have disastrous results.