On The Run

 

 

Hi, I’d like to introduce myself, I’m Tony Shone, and I’m you in another body, in another life. I make assumptions and live by them. I assume I’m right. Just as you do. I have honed my systems of operation through many years of living.

 

I have come through the many phases of existence, of so called personal development. Now a father of grown up children, whose own parents are sadly passed, I have been the scrabbling youth, the young ambivalent man finding his mind, his self, his path and place in the world. Numerously I have felt the embrace of companionship only to see it fade or fall; that naive lover of novelty. A man in his time repeatedly lets slip to smithereens in tardy lament the preciousness of life’s myriad gifts, in his search for wisdom, liberty, fulfilment; the search being itself the greatest breach of its promise. Having broken and been broken many times over, rebuilt in a solider form whose toughened exterior makes all the more hidden that sweet liberty of true being, that wholly preserved, fleetingly hinted at terrified invisible bright thing, I confess I knew nothing of clarity.

 

My fifth decade came and passed. I was in a world of my own. I was going from one thing to the next for the longest time. But recently I’ve got to thinking outside of this tiny shell. It’s self-awareness. I witness myself, Tony Shone, going from one thing to the next, and I experience a chuckling amusement of the man I am, Tony Shone, his daily and weekly, his moment to moments, his lifetime travails.

 

In the faster than fast world, I do most of my thinking when I’m on the move. In the vain world, in the hypchondriachal times, I do my thinking while I’m exercising. Although sometimes I think when I’m on the toilet, but mostly on the toilet I dream. I distinguish the two. Dreaming is a stationery pursuit, if you can entertain paradox and oxymoron as I do. We humans inhabit two commensurate spaces. I move in my mind. Pure thinking is different. I’m making a distinction. I think to propel action. I do this on the move. There is logic to my system that cannot escape.

 

I’m old school. I run outdoors. I run free. Keeping myself in fine fettle halfway into the sixth, sometimes fatal, decade, I make headway and then I return to the start position.

 

Before setting off on a run, I jog in place at the top of the path and commit myself to several well-practiced stretches as I contemplate the route - one of many known circuits I complete - and then speed off in either direction according to plan. Classically attired in shorts and vest come all seasons, I’m unconcerned about the weather conditions and like to feel the elements against my flesh as I cut through.

 

From a young age, I’ve run. When I run I work it all out. When I run I’m real. I’m alive. I’m relaxed. I’m in control, stress-free, invigorated, propelling myself in a high speed meditative state. I resolve as I run into a consolidated position upon my return. I run varied laps of the city, but they’re all circuits and circles of my life. I run round in circles to find my way home. And from that vantage point, and the advancing positions, I do my best thinking

 

Tony Shone: everyone’s got a different opinion, looking in with a great big ‘what?’ and figuring it out to the best of their ability and inclination. The view from the outside - what do they see? I try to figure it out to the best of my ability, when I’m running, when I’m on the toilet. I think of it all in these ways.

 

I look at my friends sometimes and swear I know them better than they do themselves. They do the same with me. They have an image, and I hope and hedge my bets that it’s somewhere close to the one I’m trying to create. If it’s not, what’s the point, and it’s an unknowable. I know they’re hoping and hedging bets too, for little point. And that’s where I’m up to with all this. I’m at that realisation. I get around a lot in my imagination, during my thinking time - running, defecating.

 

It’s the same with my family. We look at each other and imagine we know it all. We think the years have resolved into a clearer and clearer picture. And up against the subject’s (family member) complex incremental denials, which we observe in the process of building every day, whether it’s my wife or my children, I believe I know them better than they know themselves. I’m convinced of it. Especially my wife. She knows nothing about herself. She refuses to know. And I have vast conscious insight into the woman.

 

I’m absolutely convinced of my superior knowledge of my family most of the time. It’s a form of madness. I impute to these people I love superior ignorance, for I pride myself on thoroughgoing self-knowledge; knowledge growing with time into something even greater, whilst to other people I am almost totally unknowable, misunderstood, an enigma. Although I confess to its frustration, I like it that way. I feel superior and safe. I feel alone. I imagine some, perhaps many, if not most, if not all people, live this way.

 

I sit on the toilet and imagine these things. I run to find out what to do about them. Do you see the distinction, between running and defecating? 

 

I’m 56 years old. I can’t sit still for longer than it takes to defecate, and I run. I take frequent trips to the bathroom to fantasise. Just as everyone else, I operate a complicated system of folly. It keeps me sane.

 

I run for pleasure. I run in pain. When I’m stressed, I run. When I’m relieved, I run to celebrate. When I’m indifferent to life, I run until my pounding feet and heart make life’s relevance undeniable. I run away from and towards. I run to escape and confront. The pathway of the lap allows for the operation of these paradoxical principles and the fullness of living that such a method affords. The lap is my God; the circuit. The circle of my route watches me from the inside and from the outside, for on the run I exist on that thin line of joint visibility. I follow it. It looks after me. There is no above or beneath, we exist on a horizontal plain.

 

Running and I are synonymous. We’re inextricably linked. I am the run; the run is me. It’s my blood, my breath, my heart, my mind. My entirety comes into play only on the run. The run is life itself. I’m alive in the environment. The run is where I triumph against the elements of the world - against the  warping wind, its anger wrapped to me, fighting and losing as I break through victorious into my very next step, and onwards; against the demons of my mind, fallen collapsed in the distant past of the travelled road to my greater growing fitness.

 

With my feet, heart and lungs a perfect synchrony, my body is the automatic propulsion, a repetition machine repeating me into the future. In the burgeoning hypnosis, I am my head and I’m flying. For those triumphant miles and minutes around the circle of the route, I am God.

Author's Note

Possible first chapter - aren't they all.

Reviews

[SHEEMA HUQ]

a very good insight in to this man's coping mechacanisms, his routines, his background, his thoughts, his ego, well done