A light and easy-going book where Haruki Murakami shares his thoughts on running and writing, and how they’re intertwined for him. It’s a weirdly intimate book, because on the one hand, he talks about running and writing, neither of which are that personal in itself, but on the other hand, he very much gives you insight into his stream of consciousness. You get a really good sense for his motivations, what drives him, what he’s scared of, what he hopes for, and even how he sees the world.
Overall rating: 7/10
My highlights
Just a book in which I ponder various things and think out loud.
That's exactly what this book is. This entire book feels like you're in Murakami's head, and get a sense for who he is, what he thinks about, how he feels about things, and so on. There's no elaborate plot or riveting storytelling in here. When we read about a famous author, we typically like to dress them up a bit heroically in our imagination, as if they're cut from a different cloth. What this book does is really show the humanity of Murakami, and it shows you that despite being an incredibly accomplished write, essentially, he's just a normal dude with his own quirks and shortcomings and strengths, filled with many of the same doubts and anxieties we all wrestle with. Even some of his idiosyncrasies I found very relatable, some of them were exactly the kind of things I myself felt weird about for a long time, and I think that's really one of the secrets that makes this book which, when read at surface level could easily be mistaken for plain, deep.
No matter how mundane some action might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative, even meditative act.
This reminded me of a quote from one of my favorite books, Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa: "if you know the way broadly you will see it in all things".
Other than a few places where I quote from previous writings I’ve done, the bulk of this book records my thoughts and feelings in real time.
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Right now I’m aiming at increasing the distance I run, so speed is less of an issue. As long as I can run a certain distance, that’s all I care about. Sometimes I run fast when I feel like it, but if I increase the pace I shorten the amount of time I run, the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same sort of tack I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that, and the next day’s work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemingway did something like that.
I've had heard this many times over the years, and while rationally it always made sense, I was also a bit dismissive towards it. I've always been the kind of person that would wring the sponge completely, squeeze out every last drop with full force when I could, a kind of "strike the iron as long as it's hot" (instead of "while it's hot") mentality. I felt if I work myself to to the limit of exhaustion, that was fine, it didn't matter, what matter was the work produced. But by now I've come to realize that, at least for me, this was misguided. Even if I only care about the work produced, keeping something in the tank is the better approach. It's just more sustainable. It enables you to work more sustainably and build a bigger, better body of work over a long period of time, to consistently do your practice.
To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow. The problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed—and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage.
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When I was younger it wasn’t as if I had as much free time as I wanted, but at least I didn’t have as many miscellaneous chores as I do now. I don’t know why, but the older you get, the busier you become.
This is very true, and I wish it's something I'd have learned earlier in life. When you're a small kid, life seems like an infinite canvas. At age 7, 40 years is an unfathomable amount of time. Even if you understand it rationally, logically, with your mind, you can't really grasp how much time it is. Now you're probably nodding your head, but here's the thing: Even at age 20 you can't grasp how much 40 years really are. In fact, even at age 30 you can't grasp it. I'm 40, and let me tell you: time is flying by fast. This seems paradoxical, but it's true. You get busier, time flies by faster the older you get. I'm sure by age 50, I'll say, OMG I had no idea what 50 was when I was 40. The only lesson you can take away from this is: value your time above anything. Don't waste it. This doesn't mean you have to become a learning machine or an obsessive workaholic—quite the contrary. It means you want to do things you love and make time for what matters. Now. Not someday.
The thing is, I’m not much for team sports. That’s just the way I am. Whenever I play soccer or baseball—actually, since becoming an adult this is hardly ever—I never feel comfortable. Maybe it’s because I don’t have any brothers, but I could never get into the kind of games you play with others. I’m also not very good at one-on-one sports like tennis. I enjoy squash, but generally when it comes to a game against someone, the competitive aspect makes me uncomfortable. And when it comes to martial arts, too, you can count me out.
I'm very much the same way. I'm solitary man when it comes to sports. While this might seem like a superficial observation, I think it reveals something deeper about your personality, and transfers to other areas of life than just sports. It doesn't mean you're a loner. One of my favorite things in the world is spending quality time with friends and loved ones. But when it comes to work, I typically do my best work in solitude. But there's more to unpack here. I don't know what exactly the lesson here is, but I think it's interesting to explore, there's something deeper here, and it raises a question which, even if I haven't found a clearcut answer yet, I will keep pondering.
Don’t misunderstand me—I’m not totally uncompetitive. It’s just that for some reason I never cared all that much whether I beat others or lost to them. This sentiment remained pretty much unchanged after I grew up. It doesn’t matter what field you’re talking about—beating somebody else just doesn’t do it for me. I’m much more interested in whether I reach the goals that I set for myself, so in this sense long-distance running is the perfect fit for a mindset like mine.
To this I can very much relate. I dislike losing against someone, I like winning, but overall it doesn't mean that much to me. Most of my friends care much more about this. That said, I'm highly competitive with myself. Do I live up to my own standards? Am I making progress?
The same can be said about my profession. In the novelist’s profession, as far as I’m concerned, there’s no such thing as winning or losing. Maybe numbers of copies sold, awards won, and critics’ praise serve as outward standards for accomplishment in literature, but none of them really matter. What’s crucial is whether your writing attains the standards you’ve set for yourself. Failure to reach that bar is not something you can easily explain away. When it comes to other people, you can always come up with a reasonable explanation, but you can’t fool yourself. In this sense, writing novels and running full marathons are very much alike.
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In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.
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(Fortunately, the peak for artists varies considerably. Dostoyevsky, for instance, wrote two of his most profound novels, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov, in the last few years of his life before his death at age sixty. Domenico Scarlatti wrote 555 piano sonatas during his lifetime, most of them when he was between the ages of fifty-seven and sixty-two.)
As I've grown older, I'm naturally more attracted to the idea of people who had their peak achievements late in life. I think if you set out to do something you really care about, you'll invariably wrestle with self-doubt, and it's good to have a collection of stories that give you hope.
It might be a little silly for someone getting to be my age to put this into words, but I just want to make sure I get the facts down clearly: I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. I’ve had this tendency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much preferred reading books on my own or concentrating on listening to music over being with someone else. I could always think of things to do by myself.
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The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky as always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky. The sky both exists and doesn’t exist. It has substance and at the same time doesn’t. And we merely accept that vast expanse and drink it in.
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I never had any ambitions to be a novelist. I just had this strong desire to write a novel. No concrete image of what I wanted to write about, just the conviction that if I wrote it now I could come up with something that I’d find convincing. When I thought about sitting down at my desk at home and setting out to write I realized I didn’t even own a decent fountain pen. So I went to the Kinokuniya store in Shinjuku and bought a sheaf of manuscript paper and a five-dollar Sailor fountain pen. A small capital investment on my part. This was in the spring of 1978, and by fall I’d finished a two-hundred-page work handwritten on Japanese manuscript paper. After I finished it I felt great. I had no idea what to do with the novel once I finished it, but I just sort of let the momentum carry me and sent it in to be considered for a literary magazine’s new-writers prize. I shipped it off without making a copy, so it seems I didn’t much care if it wasn’t selected and vanished forever. This is the work that’s published under the title Hear the Wind Sing. I was more interested in having finished it than in whether or not it would ever see the light of day.
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What follows are a few paragraphs on his decision to shut down his business and fully commit to writing:
Every day for three years I ran my jazz club—keeping accounts, checking inventory, scheduling my staff, standing behind the counter myself mixing up cocktails and cooking, closing up in the wee hours of the morning—and only then writing at home at the kitchen table until I got sleepy. I felt like I was living enough for two people’s lives. Physically, every day was tough, and writing novels and running a business at the same time made for all sorts of other problems. Running a service-oriented business means you have to accept whoever comes through the door. No matter who comes in, unless they’re really awful, you have to greet them with a friendly smile on your face. Thanks to this, though, I met all kinds of offbeat people and had some unusual encounters. Before I began writing, I dutifully, even enthusiastically, absorbed a variety of experiences. For the most part I think I enjoyed these and all the stimuli that they brought.
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And after giving it a lot of thought, I decided to close the business for a while and concentrate solely on writing.
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Most people I knew were flat out against my decision, or else had grave doubts about it. “Your business is doing fine now,” they said. “Why not just let someone else run it for a time while you go and write your novels?” From the world’s viewpoint this makes perfect sense.
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And most people probably didn’t think I’d make it as a professional writer. But I couldn’t follow their advice. I’m the kind of person who has to totally commit to whatever I do. I just couldn’t do something clever like writing a novel while someone else ran the business. I had to give it everything I had. If I failed, I could accept that. But I knew that if I did things halfheartedly and they didn’t work out, I’d always have regrets.
I often ask myself whether I should go all-in and focus purely on chasing my dreams, or be smart about it: keep my day-job, maintain a stable income, while building out my "dream business" as a sidehustle at first, and once that generates enough revenue wind my dayjob down. A smoother, safer transition so to speak. There's good arguments to be made for both. I've always been the go all in kind of guy, but now, at age 40, with a family to support, it's not that easy anymore. If I fall flat on my face, it's not just me, I can't just brush myself up and try again—it's also my wife and daughter that would suffer the consequences.
I tend to gain weight if I don’t do anything.
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Back then I was smoking sixty cigarettes a day. All my fingers were yellow, and my whole body reeked of smoke.
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This was because these were forced on me from above. I never could stand being forced to do something I didn’t want to do at a time I didn’t want to do it. Whenever I was able to do something I liked to do, though, when I wanted to do it, and the way I wanted to do it, I’d give it everything I had.
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I was never interested in things I was forced to study.
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I only began to enjoy studying after I got through the educational system
This was again one of those moments where I recognized a part of myself I'm not at peace with. I'm very similar in this regard: I hate the feeling of being forced to do something. In fact, even if it's something I'd like to do, if I feel like someone is forcing me to, I despise it. This is a flaw, and it has come at an unnecessarily high cost for me many times in life. But I can't help it. I always viewed it, and still do view it, as a weakness of mine. Most people are able to rationally think it through and tell themselves: "That's just the way things work. This isn't too bad, it's not such a big deal. It comes with the package. Just do this thing, even if you think it's dumb, and then you can do that other thing that you want, or you get this thing that you want." I can't, even though I've tried many times. It always made me feel miserable to the core. I'm a foolishly stubborn donkey.
The happiest thing about becoming a professional writer was that I could go to bed early and get up early.
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After I closed the bar and began my life as a novelist, the first thing we—and by we I mean my wife and I—did was completely revamp our lifestyle.
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We decided we’d go to bed soon after it got dark, and wake up with the sun.
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So my new, simple, and regular life began. I got up before five a.m. and went to bed before ten p.m. People are at their best at different times of day, but I’m definitely a morning person. That’s when I can focus and finish up important work I have to do.
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Afterward I work out or do other errands that don’t take much concentration. At the end of the day I relax and don’t do any more work. I read, listen to music, take it easy, and try to go to bed early.
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I placed the highest priority on the sort of life that lets me focus on writing,
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the indispensable relationship I should build in my life was not with a specific person, but with an unspecified number of readers.
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I’ve consistently considered this invisible, conceptual relationship to be the most important thing in my life.
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I went on writing the kind of things I wanted to write, exactly the way I wanted to write them, and if that allowed me to make a normal living, then I couldn’t ask for more.
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Writers who are blessed with inborn talent can freely write novels no matter what they do—or don’t do. Like water from a natural spring, the sentences just well up, and with little or no effort these writers can complete a work.
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To write a novel I have to drive myself hard physically and use a lot of time and effort. Every time I begin a new novel, I have to dredge out another new, deep hole. But as I’ve sustained this kind of life over many years, I’ve become quite efficient, both technically and physically, at opening a hole in the hard rock and locating a new water vein.
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The most important thing we ever learn at school is the fact that the most important things can’t be learned at school.
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(I’m never able to keep a regular diary for very long, but I’ve faithfully kept up my runner’s journal)
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The finish line. I finally reach the end. Strangely, I have no feeling of accomplishment. The only thing I feel is utter relief that I don’t have to run anymore. I use a spigot at a gas station to cool off my overheated body and wash away the salt stuck to me. I’m covered with salt, a veritable human salt field. When the old man at the gas station hears what I’ve done, he snips off some flowers from a potted plant and presents me with a bouquet. You did a good job, he smiles. Congratulations. I feel so thankful for these small gestures of kindness from foreigners.
I've experienced little gestures of kindness like these from strangers at random times in my life too, and they've for some reason moved me and touched me deeply, and I've since tried to find opportunities to do the same for others as well. It really doesn't take much at times to lighten up someone's day, and create a lasting memory of how good humanity is.
Rereading the article I wrote at the time of this run in Greece, I’ve discovered that after twenty-some years, and as many marathons later, the feelings I have when I run twenty-six miles are the same as back then. Even now, whenever I run a marathon my mind goes through the same exact process. Up to nineteen miles I’m sure I can run a good time, but past twenty-two miles I run out of fuel and start to get upset at everything. And at the end I feel like a car that’s run out of gas. But after I finish and some time has passed, I forget all the pain and misery and am already planning how I can run an even better time in the next race. The funny thing is, no matter how much experience I have under my belt, no matter how old I get, it’s all just a repeat of what came before.
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The total amount of running I’m doing might be going down, but at least I’m following one of my basic rules for training: I never take two days off in a row. Muscles are like work animals that are quick on the uptake. If you carefully increase the load, step by step, they learn to take it. As long as you explain your expectations to them by actually showing them examples of the amount of work they have to endure, your muscles will comply and gradually get stronger. It doesn’t happen overnight, of course. But as long as you take your time and do it in stages, they won’t complain—aside from the occasional long face—and they’ll very patiently and obediently grow stronger. Through repetition you input into your muscles the message that this is how much work they have to perform. Our muscles are very conscientious. As long as we observe the correct procedure, they won’t complain. If, however, the load halts for a few days, the muscles automatically assume they don’t have to work that hard anymore, and they lower their limits. Muscles really are like animals, and they want to take it as easy as possible; if pressure isn’t applied to them, they relax and cancel out the memory of all that work. Input this canceled memory once again, and you have to repeat the whole journey from the very beginning. Naturally it’s important to take a break sometimes, but in a critical time like this, when I’m training for a race, I have to show my muscles who’s boss. I have to make it clear to them what’s expected. I have to maintain a certain tension by being unsparing, but not to the point where I burn out. These are tactics that all experienced runners learn over time.
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Even if there were two of me, I still couldn’t do all that has to be done. No matter what, though, I keep up my running. Running every day is a kind of lifeline for me, so I’m not going to lay off or quit just because I’m busy. If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I’d never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit. All I can do is keep those few reasons nicely polished.
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In every interview I’m asked what’s the most important quality a novelist has to have. It’s pretty obvious: talent. No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist. This is more of a prerequisite than a necessary quality. If you don’t have any fuel, even the best car won’t run. The problem with talent, though, is that in most cases the person involved can’t control its amount or quality. You might find the amount isn’t enough and you want to increase it, or you might try to be frugal to make it last longer, but in neither case do things work out that easily. Talent has a mind of its own and wells up when it wants to, and once it dries up, that’s it. Of course certain poets and rock singers whose genius went out in a blaze of glory—people like Schubert and Mozart, whose dramatic early deaths turned them into legends—have a certain appeal, but for the vast majority of us this isn’t the model we follow. If I’m asked what the next most important quality is for a novelist, that’s easy too: focus—the ability to concentrate all your limited talents on whatever’s critical at the moment. Without that you can’t accomplish anything of value, while, if you can focus effectively, you’ll be able to compensate for an erratic talent or even a shortage of it. I generally concentrate on work for three or four hours every morning. I sit at my desk and focus totally on what I’m writing. I don’t see anything else, I don’t think about anything else. Even a novelist who has a lot of talent and a mind full of great new ideas probably can’t write a thing if, for instance, he’s suffering a lot of pain from a cavity. The pain blocks concentration. That’s what I mean when I say that without focus you can’t accomplish anything.
I always like to learn about the approach a writer takes to get the job done, and one of the things I've noticed is that most professional writers talk about this upper limit of 3 to 4 hours of focused work that they can put in sustainably each day. This is quite remarkable, and also encouraging, especially if you are busy with other responsibilities. Even carving out some extra time every day can bring you considerably closer to your goal. Here's a great outtake from a conversation between Stephen Pressfield and Marie Forleo on the matter.
After focus, the next most important thing for a novelist is, hands down, endurance. If you concentrate on writing three or four hours a day and feel tired after a week of this, you’re not going to be able to write a long work. What’s needed for a writer of fiction—at least one who hopes to write a novel—is the energy to focus every day for half a year, or a year, two years. You can compare it to breathing. If concentration is the process of just holding your breath, endurance is the art of slowly, quietly breathing at the same time you’re storing air in your lungs. Unless you can find a balance between both, it’ll be difficult to write novels professionally over a long time. Continuing to breathe while you hold your breath. Fortunately, these two disciplines—focus and endurance—are different from talent, since they can be acquired and sharpened through training. You’ll naturally learn both concentration and endurance when you sit down every day at your desk and train yourself to focus on one point. This is a lot like the training of muscles I wrote of a moment ago. You have to continually transmit the object of your focus to your entire body, and make sure it thoroughly assimilates the information necessary for you to write every single day and concentrate on the work at hand. And gradually you’ll expand the limits of what you’re able to do. Almost imperceptibly you’ll make the bar rise. This involves the same process as jogging every day to strengthen your muscles and develop a runner’s physique. Add a stimulus and keep it up. And repeat. Patience is a must in this process, but I guarantee the results will come.
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Writing novels, to me, is basically a kind of manual labor. Writing itself is mental labor, but finishing an entire book is closer to manual labor. It doesn’t involve heavy lifting, running fast, or leaping high. Most people, though, only see the surface reality of writing and think of writers as involved in quiet, intellectual work done in their study. If you have the strength to lift a coffee cup, they figure, you can write a novel. But once you try your hand at it, you soon find that it isn’t as peaceful a job as it seems. The whole process—sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the whole flow of the story on track—requires far more energy, over a long period, than most people ever imagine. You might not move your body around, but there’s grueling, dynamic labor going on inside you.
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writers who aren’t blessed with much talent—those who barely make the grade—need to build up their strength at their own expense. They have to train themselves to improve their focus, to increase their endurance. To a certain extent they’re forced to make these qualities stand in for talent. And while they’re getting by on these, they may actually discover real, hidden talent within them. They’re sweating, digging out a hole at their feet with a shovel, when they run across a deep, secret water vein. It’s a lucky thing, but what made this good fortune possible was all the training they did that gave them the strength to keep on digging. I imagine that late-blooming writers have all gone through a similar process.
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Naturally there are people in the world (only a handful, for sure) blessed with enormous talent that, from beginning to end, doesn’t fade, and whose works are always of the highest quality. These fortunate few have a water vein that never dries up, no matter how much they tap into it. For literature, this is something to be thankful for. It’s hard to imagine the history of literature without such figures as Shakespeare, Balzac, and Dickens. But the giants are, in the end, giants—exceptional, legendary figures.
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Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day. These are practical, physical lessons. How much can I push myself? How much rest is appropriate—and how much is too much? How far can I take something and still keep it decent and consistent? When does it become narrow-minded and inflexible? How much should I be aware of the world outside, and how much should I focus on my inner world? To what extent should I be confident in my abilities, and when should I start doubting myself? I know that if I hadn’t become a long-distance runner when I became a novelist, my work would have been vastly different. How different? Hard to say. But something would have definitely been different.
I found this fascinating, and even though I'm not a runner, it expressed something clearly that I vaguely sensed is true with any form of creative expression, be it writing or something else.
When you see runners in town it’s easy to distinguish beginners from veterans. The ones panting are beginners; the ones with quiet, measured breathing are the veterans.
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Sometimes I have to hit my legs with a fist when they get tight to loosen them up. (Yes, it hurts.) My muscles can be as stubborn as—or more stubborn than—I am. They remember things and endure, and to some extent they improve. But they never compromise. They don’t give up. This is my body, with all its limits and quirks. Just as with my face, even if I don’t like it it’s the only one I get, so I’ve got to make do. As I’ve grown older, I’ve naturally come to terms with this. You open the fridge and can make a nice—actually even a pretty smart—meal with the leftovers. All that’s left is an apple, an onion, cheese, and eggs, but you don’t complain. You make do with what you have. As you age you learn even to be happy with what you have. That’s one of the few good points of growing older.
I think that's true for most people, but I can also think of people who fail to learn that, and it just becomes sadder and sadder to see that the older they get.
Seeing a lot of water like that every day is probably an important thing for human beings. For human beings might be a bit of a generalization—but I do know it’s important for one person: me. If I go for a time without seeing water, I feel like something’s slowly draining out of me. It’s probably like the feeling a music lover has when, for whatever reason, he’s separated from music for a long time. The fact that I was raised near the sea might have something to do with it. The surface of the water changes from day to day: the color, the shape of the waves, the speed of the current. Each season brings distinct changes to the plants and animals that surround the river. Clouds of all sizes show up and move on, and the surface of the river, lit by the sun, reflects these white shapes as they come and go, sometimes faithfully, sometimes distortedly.
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As I’m leisurely jogging along the Charles River, girls who look to be new Harvard freshmen keep on passing me. Most of these girls are small, slim, have on maroon Harvard-logo outfits, blond hair in a ponytail, and brand-new iPods, and they run like the wind. You can definitely feel a sort of aggressive challenge emanating from them. They seem to be used to passing people, and probably not used to being passed. They all look so bright, so healthy, attractive, and serious, brimming with self-confidence. With their long strides and strong, sharp kicks, it’s easy to see that they’re typical mid-distance runners, unsuited for long-distance running. They’re more mentally cut out for brief runs at high speed. Compared to them I’m pretty used to losing. There are plenty of things in this world that are way beyond me, plenty of opponents I can never beat. Not to brag, but these girls probably don’t know as much as I do about pain. And, quite naturally, there might not be a need for them to know it. These random thoughts come to me as I watch their proud ponytails swinging back and forth, their aggressive strides. Keeping to my own leisurely pace, I continue my run down along the Charles. Have I ever had such luminous days in my own life? Perhaps a few. But even if I had a long ponytail back then, I doubt if it would have swung so proudly as these girls’ ponytails do. And my legs wouldn’t have kicked the ground as cleanly and as powerfully as theirs. Maybe that’s only to be expected. These girls are, after all, brand-new students at the one and only Harvard University. Still, it’s pretty wonderful to watch these pretty girls run. As I do, I’m struck by an obvious thought: One generation takes over from the next. This is how things are handed over in this world, so I don’t feel so bad if they pass me. These girls have their own pace, their own sense of time. And I have my own pace, my own sense of time. The two are completely different, but that’s the way it should be.
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Basically I agree with the view that writing novels is an unhealthy type of work. When we set off to write a novel, when we use writing to create a story, like it or not a kind of toxin that lies deep down in all humanity rises to the surface. All writers have to come face-to-face with this toxin and, aware of the danger involved, discover a way to deal with it, because otherwise no creative activity in the real sense can take place. (Please excuse the strange analogy: with a fugu fish, the tastiest part is the portion near the poison—this might be something similar to what I’m getting at.) No matter how you spin it, this isn’t a healthy activity.
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To deal with something unhealthy, a person needs to be as healthy as possible. That’s my motto. In other words, an unhealthy soul requires a healthy body. This might sound paradoxical, but it’s something I’ve felt very keenly ever since I became a professional writer. The healthy and the unhealthy are not necessarily at opposite ends of the spectrum. They don’t stand in opposition to each other, but rather complement each other, and in some cases even band together.
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On October 6 I’m giving a reading at MIT, and since I’ll have to speak in front of people, today as I ran I practiced the speech (not out loud, of course). When I do this, I don’t listen to music. I just whisper the English in my head.
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At 26.2 miles there’s a sign that says, “This is the distance of a marathon.” There’s a white line painted on the concrete indicating the exact spot. I exaggerate only a bit when I say that the moment I straddled that line a slight shiver went through me, for this was the first time I’d ever run more than a marathon. For me this was the Strait of Gibraltar, beyond which lay an unknown sea. What lay in wait beyond this, what unknown creatures were living there, I didn’t have a clue. In my own small way I felt the same fear that sailors of old must have felt.
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But I didn’t walk a single step. I stopped a lot to stretch, but I never walked. I didn’t come here to walk. I came to run.
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I felt like I’d passed through something. That’s what it felt like. Passed through is the only way I can express it. Like my body had passed clean through a stone wall. At what exact point I felt like I’d made it through, I can’t recall, but suddenly I noticed I was already on the other side. I was convinced I’d made it through.
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there wasn’t the need to try to consciously think about not thinking.
[…]
I had been transformed into a being on autopilot, whose sole purpose was to rhythmically swing his arms back and forth, move his legs forward one step at a time. I didn’t think about anything. I didn’t feel anything. I realized all of a sudden that even physical pain had all but vanished. Or maybe it was shoved into some unseen corner, like some ugly furniture you can’t get rid of.
[…]
I was in the midst of deep exhaustion that I’d totally accepted, and the reality was that I was still able to continue running, and for me there was nothing more I could ask of the world.
[…]
at the end I hardly knew who I was or what I was doing. This should have been a very alarming feeling, but it didn’t feel that way. By then running had entered the realm of the metaphysical.
[…]
Evening had come on (we’d started early in the morning), and the air had a special clarity to it. I could also smell the deep grass of the beginning of summer.
[…]
I saw a few foxes, too, gathered in a field. They looked at us runners curiously. Thick, meaningful clouds, like something out of a nineteenth-century British landscape painting, covered the sky. There was no wind at all. Many of the other runners around me were just silently trudging toward the finish line. Being among them gave me a quiet sense of happiness. Breathe in, breathe out. My breath didn’t seem ragged at all. The air calmly went inside me and then went out. My silent heart expanded and contracted, over and over, at a fixed rate. Like the bellows of a worker, my lungs faithfully brought fresh oxygen into my body. I could sense all these organs working, and distinguish each and every sound they made. Everything was working just fine.
[…]
The end of the race is just a temporary marker without much significance. It’s the same with our lives. Just because there’s an end doesn’t mean existence has meaning. An end point is simply set up as a temporary marker, or perhaps as an indirect metaphor for the fleeting nature of existence. It’s very philosophical—not that at this point I’m thinking how philosophical it is. I just vaguely experience this idea, not with words, but as a physical sensation.
This is one of these phenomena for which there should be a word. The moment when you switch from knowing, or understanding something mentally, to actually feeling it. When knowledge transforms into embodied realization. I don't know how to best describe this, but I know that I would be a much more well-rounded person if I could just transfer more of the knowledge I have in my head to that level of experiential physical sensation.
Still, the most significant fallout from running the ultramarathon wasn’t physical but mental. What I ended up with was a sense of lethargy, and before I knew it, I felt covered by a thin film, something I’ve since dubbed runner’s blues. (Though the actual feeling of it was closer to a milky white.)
[…]
a mental gap began to develop between me and running. Just like when you lose the initial crazy feeling you have when you fall in love.
[…]
Now I feel like I’m finally getting away from the runner’s-blues fog that’s surrounded me for so long. Not that I’ve completely rid myself of it, but I can sense something beginning to stir. In the morning as I lace up my running shoes, I can catch a faint sign of something in the air, and within me.
[…]
I want to take good care of this sprout that’s sprung up.
[…]
Gatsby really is an outstanding novel. I never get tired of it, no matter how many times I read it. It’s the kind of literature that nourishes you as you read, and every time I do I’m struck by something new, and experience a fresh reaction to it. I find it amazing how such a young writer, only twenty-nine at the time, could grasp—so insightfully, so equitably, and so warmly—the realities of life.
Funny, I was underwhelmed by Gatsby. Beautiful prose, but ultimately I thought it fell flat, it lacked the nuanced depth I found in other books. Or maybe it just eluded me.
Still, I feel a bit uneasy. Has the dark shadow really disappeared? Or is it inside me, concealed, waiting for its chance to reappear? Like a clever thief hidden inside a house, breathing quietly, waiting until everyone’s asleep. I have looked deep inside myself, trying to detect something that might be there. But just as our consciousness is a maze, so too is our body. Everywhere you turn there’s darkness, and a blind spot. Everywhere you find silent hints, everywhere a surprise is waiting for you. All I have to go on are experience and instinct. Experience has taught me this: You’ve done everything you needed to do, and there’s no sense in rehashing it. All you can do now is wait for the race. And what instinct has taught me is one thing only: Use your imagination. So I close my eyes and see it all. I imagine myself, along with thousands of other runners, going through Brooklyn, through Harlem, through the streets of New York. I see myself crossing several steel suspension bridges, and experience the emotions I’ll have as I run along bustling Central Park South, close to the finish line. I see the old steakhouse near our hotel where we’ll eat after the race. These scenes give my body a quiet vitality. I no longer fix my gaze on the shades of darkness. I no longer listen to the echoes of silence.
[…]
New York in November really does have a special charm to it. The air is clear and crisp, and the leaves on the trees in Central Park are just beginning to turn golden. The sky is so clear you can see forever, and the skyscrapers lavishly reflect the sun’s rays. You feel you can keep on walking one block after another without end. Expensive cashmere coats fill the windows at Bergdorf Goodman, and the streets are filled with the delicious smell of roasted pretzels.
[…]
The first thing to remember when you ride a competitive bike is to lean forward as much as possible to be more aerodynamic—especially to keep your face forward and up. No matter what, you have to learn this pose. Until you’re used to it, holding in this position for over an hour—like a praying mantis with a raised head—is next to impossible. Very quickly your back and neck start to scream. When you get exhausted your head tends to drop and you look down, and once that happens all the dangers lurking out there strike. When I was training for my first triathlon and rode nearly sixty-two miles at a stretch, I ran right into a metal post—one of those stakes set up to prevent cars and motorcycles from using the recreational lane along a river. I was tired, my mind elsewhere, and I neglected to keep my face forward. The front wheel of the bike got all bent out of shape, and I was flung head first to the ground. I suddenly found myself literally flying through the air. Fortunately, my helmet protected my head; otherwise I would have been badly injured. My arms were scraped pretty badly against the concrete, but I was lucky to get away with just that. I know a few other cyclists who’ve suffered injuries much worse. Once you have a scary incident like that, you really take it to heart. In most cases learning something essential in life requires physical pain. Since that incident on the bike, no matter how tired I might be I always keep my head up and my eyes on the road ahead.
[…]
Cycling training alone is, truthfully, pretty tough. Long runs done to prepare for marathons are definitely lonely, but hanging on to the handlebars of a bike all by yourself and pedaling on and on is a much more solitary undertaking. It’s the same movements repeated over and over. You go up slopes, on level ground, and down slopes. Sometimes the wind’s with you, sometimes against you. You switch gears as needed, change your position, check your speed, pedal harder, let up a bit, check your speed, drink water, change gears, change your position…Sometimes it strikes me as an intricate form of torture. In his book the triathlete Dave Scott wrote that of all the sports man has invented, cycling has got to be the most unpleasant of all. I totally agree.
[…]
What were the main things I did while in Cambridge? Basically, I confess, I bought a ton of LPs. In the Boston area there are still a lot of high-quality used record stores. When I had the time I also checked out record stores in New York and Maine. Seventy percent of the records I bought were jazz, the rest classical, plus a few rock records. I’m a very (or perhaps I should say extremely) enthusiastic record collector. Shipping all these records back to Japan was no mean feat. I’m not really sure how many records I have in my home right now. I’ve never counted them, and it’s too scary to try. Ever since I was fifteen I’ve bought a huge number of records, and gotten rid of a huge number. The turnover is so fast I can’t keep track of the total. They come, they go. But the total number of records is most definitely increasing. The number, though, is not the issue. If somebody asks me how many records I have, all I can say is, “Seems like I have a whole lot. But still not enough.” In Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, one of the characters, Tom Buchanan, a rich man who’s also a well-known polo player, says, “I’ve heard of making a garage out of a stable, but I’m the first man who ever made a stable out of a garage.” Not to brag, but I’m doing the same thing. Whenever I find a quality LP recording of a piece I have on CD, I don’t hesitate to sell the CD and buy the LP. And when I find a better-quality recording, something closer to the original, I don’t hesitate to trade in the old LP for a new one. It takes a lot of time to pursue this, not to mention a considerable investment of cash. Most people would, I am pretty sure, label me obsessed.
A lot of interesting and extraordinarily talented people have some kind of obsession, something that they get into deeply. But there's something unique about the collectors. Gabor Maté often talks about how he was addiction to buying classical music, which seems like a harmless addiction, but he would take it to extreme lengths, spend thousands on classical music on some days, and even once, as a doctor, left a woman who was giving birth to her child, to go and buy some classical album. I don't quite get what this obsessive drive to buy and collect a certain type of thing is about, but one thing I did observe in these people is that there always seems to be a kind of stifled, unexpressed sadness, that almost has a desiccated, withered, dried up quality to it. I don't quite know how to explain it.
And how was my time? Truth be told, not so great. At least, not as good as I’d been secretly hoping for. If possible, I was hoping to be able to wind up this book with a powerful statement like, “Thanks to all the hard training I did, I was able to post a great time at the New York City Marathon. When I finished I was really moved,” and casually stroll off into the sunset with the theme song from Rocky blaring in the background. Until I actually ran the race I still clung to the hope that things would turn out that way, and was looking forward to this dramatic finale. That was my Plan A. A really great plan, I figured. But in real life things don’t go so smoothly. At certain points in our lives, when we really need a clear-cut solution, the person who knocks at our door is, more likely than not, a messenger bearing bad news. It isn’t always the case, but from experience I’d say the gloomy reports far outnumber the others. The messenger touches his hand to his cap and looks apologetic, but that does nothing to improve the contents of the message. It isn’t the messenger’s fault. No good to blame him, no good to grab him by the collar and shake him. The messenger is just conscientiously doing the job his boss assigned him. And this boss? That would be none other than our old friend Reality.
[…]
So in the end I missed the four-hour mark by just a little. I did complete the run, after a fashion, which means I maintained my record of completing every marathon I’ve been in (a total of twenty-four now). I was able to do the bare minimum, but it was a frustrating result after all my hard training and meticulous planning. It felt like a remnant of a dark cloud had wormed its way into my stomach. No matter what, I couldn’t accept this. I’d trained so hard, so why did I get cramps? I’m not trying to argue that all effort is fairly rewarded, but if there is a God in heaven, was it asking too much to let me glimpse a sign? Was it too much to expect a little kindness?
[…]
There’s one thing, though, I can state with confidence: until the feeling that I’ve done a good job in a race returns, I’m going to keep running marathons, and not let it get me down. Even when I grow old and feeble, when people warn me it’s about time to throw in the towel, I won’t care. As long as my body allows, I’ll keep on running. Even if my time gets worse, I’ll keep on putting in as much effort—perhaps even more effort—toward my goal of finishing a marathon. I don’t care what others say—that’s just my nature, the way I am. Like scorpions sting, cicadas cling to trees, salmon swim upstream to where they were born, and wild ducks mate for life.
[…]
I may not hear the Rocky theme song, or see the sunset anywhere, but for me, and for this book, this may be a sort of conclusion. An understated, rainy-day-sneakers sort of conclusion. An anticlimax, if you will. Turn it into a screenplay, and the Hollywood producer would just glance at the last page and toss it back. But the long and the short of it is that this kind of conclusion fits who I am. What I mean is, I didn’t start running because somebody asked me to become a runner. Just like I didn’t become a novelist because someone asked me to. One day, out of the blue, I wanted to write a novel. And one day, out of the blue, I started to run—simply because I wanted to. I’ve always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I’m wrong, but I won’t change.
[…]
I look up at the sky, wondering if I’ll catch a glimpse of kindness there, but I don’t. All I see are indifferent summer clouds drifting over the Pacific. And they have nothing to say to me. Clouds are always taciturn. I probably shouldn’t be looking up at them. What I should be looking at is inside of me. Like staring down into a deep well. Can I see kindness there? No, all I see is my own nature. My own individual, stubborn, uncooperative, often self-centered nature that still doubts itself—that, when troubles occur, tries to find something funny, or something nearly funny, about the situation. I’ve carried this character around like an old suitcase, down a long, dusty path. I’m not carrying it because I like it. The contents are too heavy, and it looks crummy, fraying in spots. I’ve carried it with me because there was nothing else I was supposed to carry. Still, I guess I have grown attached to it. As you might expect. So here I am training every day for the Murakami City Triathlon in Niigata Prefecture. In other words, I’m still lugging around that old suitcase, most likely headed toward another anticlimax. Toward a taciturn, unadorned maturity—or, to put it more modestly, toward an evolving dead end.
[…]
since your faults and deficiencies are well nigh infinite, you’d best figure out your good points and learn to get by with what you have.
[…]
In fact, whenever I drive the 217 miles to Niigata for this triathlon I’m always expecting the worst in terms of weather, convinced that something terrible’s going to happen. It might as well be a sort of image training for me. Even this time, when I first saw the placid, warm sea, I felt like someone was trying to pull a fast one. Don’t fall for it, I warned myself. This was just make-believe; there had to be a trap lying in wait. Maybe a school of vicious, poisonous jellyfish. Or a pre-hibernation, ravenous bear would charge at my bike. Or an unfortunate bolt of lightning would zap me right in the head. Or maybe I’d be attacked by a swarm of angry bees. Maybe my wife, waiting for me at the finish line, was going to have discovered some awful secrets about me (I suddenly felt like there might actually be some). Needless to say, I always view this meet, the Murakami International Triathlon, with a bit of trepidation. I never have any idea what will happen.
[…]
Some people who practice only in pools find it hard, and frightening, to swim in the ocean, but not me. I actually find it easier because there’s so much space and you’re more buoyant.
[…]
I got into the water, got ready to swim, and suddenly had trouble breathing. I’d lift my head to breathe, same as always, but the timing was off. And when I’m not breathing right, fear takes over and my muscles tense up. My chest starts pounding, and my arms and legs won’t move the way I want them to. I get scared to put my face in the water and start to panic.
[…]
At the first triathlon I’d ever participated in there was a floating start, where all the participants lined up in the water. As we were waiting, the person next to me kicked me hard in the side several times. It’s a competition, so it’s to be expected—everybody’s trying to get ahead of others and take the shortest route. Getting hit in the elbow while you’re swimming, getting kicked, swallowing water, having your goggles fall off—it’s all par for the course. But for me, getting kicked hard like that in my first race was a shock, and that may have thrown my swimming off. Perhaps subconsciously that memory was coming back to me every time I started a race. I don’t want to think that way, but the mental side of a race is critical, so it’s very possible.
This is the part of humanity that I don't get. It's a reality, I'm all too familiar with it, and yet, this kind of behavior seems more befitting to an insect than a human being.
I hired a few swimming coaches to help me improve my form, but none of them were what I was looking for. Lots of people know how to swim, but those who can efficiently teach how to swim are few and far between. That’s the feeling I get. It’s difficult to teach how to write novels (at least I know I couldn’t), but teaching swimming is just as hard. And this isn’t just confined to swimming and novels. Of course there are teachers who can teach a set subject, in a set order, using predetermined phrases, but there aren’t many who can adjust their teaching to the abilities and tendencies of their pupils and explain things in their own individual way. Maybe hardly any at all. I wasted the first two years trying to find a good coach. Each new coach tinkered with my form just enough to mess up my swimming, sometimes to the point where I could hardly swim at all. Naturally, my confidence went down the drain. At this rate there was no way I could enter a triathlon. Things started to improve around the time I realized that revolutionizing my form was probably impossible. My wife was the one who found me a good coach. She’d never been able to swim her whole life, but she happened to meet a young woman coach at the gym she’s a member of, and you wouldn’t believe how well she swims now. She recommended that I try this young woman as my coach too. The first thing this coach did was check my overall swimming and ask what my goals were. “I want to participate in a triathlon,” I told her. “So you want to be able to do the crawl in the ocean and swim long distances?” she asked. “That’s right,” I replied. “I don’t need to sprint over short distances.” “Good,” she said. “I’m glad you have clear-cut goals. That makes it easier for me.” So we began one-on-one lessons to reshape my form. Her approach wasn’t a slash-and-burn policy, totally dismissing the way I’ve been swimming up till now and rebuilding from the ground up. I imagine that for an instructor it’s much more difficult to reshape someone’s form who’s already able, after a fashion, to swim, than to start with a nonswimmer, a blank sheet. It isn’t easy to get rid of bad swimming habits, so my new coach didn’t try to forcefully do a total makeover. Instead, she revised very small movements I made, one by one, over an extended period of time.
[…]
What’s special about this woman’s teaching style is that she doesn’t teach you the textbook form at the beginning. Take body rotation, for instance. To get her pupil to learn the correct way, she starts out by teaching how to swim without any rotation. In other words, people who are self-taught in the crawl have a tendency to be overconscious of rotation. Because of this there’s too much resistance in the water and their speed goes down—plus, they waste energy. So in the beginning, she teaches you to swim like a flat board without any body rotation—in other words, completely the opposite of what the textbook says. Needless to say, when I swam that way I felt like an awful, awkward swimmer. As I practiced persistently, I could swim the way she told me to, in this awkward way, but I wasn’t convinced it was doing any good. And then, ever so slowly, my coach started to add some rotation. Not emphasizing that we were practicing rotation, but just teaching a separate way of moving. The pupil has no idea what the real point of this sort of practice is. He merely does as he’s told, and keeps on moving that one part of his body. For example, if it’s how to turn your shoulders, you just repeat that endlessly. Sometimes you spend an entire session just turning your shoulders. You end up exhausted and spent, but later, in retrospect, you realize what it all was for. The parts fall into place, and you can see the whole picture and finally understand the role each individual part plays. The dawn comes, the sky grows light, and the colors and shapes of the roofs of houses, which you could only glimpse vaguely before, come into focus.
[…]
This might be similar to practicing drumming. You’re made to practice bass drum patterns only, day after day. Then you spend days on just the cymbals. Then just the tom tom…Monotonous and boring for sure, but once it all falls together you get a solid rhythm. In order to get there you have to stubbornly, rigorously, and very patiently tighten all the screws of each individual part.
[…]
This takes time, of course, but sometimes taking time is actually a shortcut.
[…]
This is the path I followed in swimming, and after a year and a half I was able to swim long distances far more gracefully and efficient than ever before.
[…]
And while I was training for swimming, I made an important discovery. I had trouble breathing during a race because I’d been hyperventilating. The same exact thing happened when I was swimming in the pool with my coach, and it dawned on me: just before the start of the race I was breathing too deeply and quickly. Probably because I was tense before a race, I got too much oxygen all at once. This led to me breathing too fast when I started to swim, which in turn threw off the timing of my breathing. It was a tremendous relief when I finally pinpointed the real problem. All I had to do now was make sure not to hyperventilate. Now before a race starts I get into the sea, swim a bit, and get my body and mind used to swimming in the ocean. I breathe moderately in order not to hyperventilate, and breathe with my hand over my mouth in order not to get too much oxygen. “I’m all set now,” I tell myself. “I’ve changed my form, and am no longer the swimmer I used to be.”
[…]
I’d always thought I was sort of a brazen person, but this issue with hyperventilating made me realize a part of me was, unexpectedly, high strung. I had no idea how nervous I got at the start of a race. But it turns out I really was tense, just like everybody else.
[…]
It doesn’t matter how old I get, but as long as I continue to live I’ll always discover something new about myself.
[…]
No matter how long you stand there examining yourself naked before a mirror, you’ll never see reflected what’s inside.
[…]
At any rate, I’d happily made it to the finish line set up in front of the Murakami City Hall. The race was over. I didn’t drown, didn’t get a flat, didn’t get stung by a vicious jellyfish. No ferocious bear hurled himself at me, and I wasn’t stung by wasps, or hit by lightning. And my wife, waiting at the finish line, didn’t discover some unpleasant truth about me. Instead, she greeted me with a smile. Thank goodness. The happiest thing for me about this day’s race was that I was able, on a personal level, to truly enjoy the event. The overall time I posted wasn’t anything to brag about, and I made a lot of little mistakes along the way.
[…]
And with the next race in mind, each of us, in our place, will most likely silently go about our usual training. Even if, seen from the outside, or from some higher vantage point, this sort of life looks pointless or futile, or even extremely inefficient, it doesn’t bother me. Maybe it’s some pointless act like, as I’ve said before, pouring water into an old pan that has a hole in the bottom, but at least the effort you put into it remains. Whether it’s good for anything or not, cool or totally uncool, in the final analysis what’s most important is what you can’t see but can feel in your heart. To be able to grasp something of value, sometimes you have to perform seemingly inefficient acts. But even activities that appear fruitless don’t necessarily end up so. That’s the feeling I have, as someone who’s felt this, who’s experienced it.
[…]
In the 1980s I used to jog every morning in Tokyo and often passed a very attractive young woman. We passed each other jogging for several years and got to recognize each other by sight and smile a greeting each time we passed. I never spoke to her (I’m too shy), and of course don’t even know her name. But seeing her face every morning as I ran was one of life’s small pleasures. Without pleasures like that, it’s pretty hard to get up and go jogging every morning.