Making Significant Decisions
Each one adds up to a good run, or a bad one. Do they matter?
Hi everyone -
The formatting on this week’s Stoic Running got seriously messed up by Substack, so I’m resending. Apologies for the two emails this week, and I hope you enjoy.
— the Stoic Runner
“They were hungry for breakfast which they ate at the cafe, ordering brioche and cafe au lait and eggs, and the type of preserve that they chose and the manner in which the eggs were to be cooked was an excitement.” — The Garden of Eden, Hemingway, 195-
Ever since I read that sentence in Hemingway’s Garden of Eden, I knew what he meant. That frisson of love, when the whole world is your world—the world of your lover and you—and the smallest decisions are delights and intrigues.
This week, I walked across a sandy lot under the same tall elms that have shaded me for 30 years and felt the same thing. How important the decisions are that precede each run. How they are all new. How they all matter, somehow, in the overall effect of this day.
The first most important decision is how tight to draw your shoelaces. The second most important decision is the route across the grass. The third is where to step on the sandy dirt road. The fourth one is which way to turn.
After that, there are no decisions except the most important one. To keep going.
And the gamble I am making is whether or not I will make the decisions that make me happy. As Raymond Carver said, he, we, and all of us have “Fear this day will end on an unhappy note.” and we strive to avoid that. If only you tie your shoelaces right; if only you choose the right track through the grass and on the road. If you choose the right direction. If only you manage to keep going, then today will turn out all right.
The issue is whether you’re able to make each decision true to you—true to what you really want—or if you waver or think “So-and-so said that’s best, so I’ll try that today.” or “What’s-her-name starts at this pace, so I’ll do that”. If you waver, the run will not be your run and it will not turn out. You might make it through, but it will not belong to you.
There’s a prison sentence to living this way, in which each day turns on whether or not the run is truly yours. When you get home, you take bad runs out on yourself and your evening hours. You are disconsolate for something that no one could have prevented except yourself, which makes it worse. On the other hand, there’s an electricity to it, where every decision is big and meaningful. And when you get it right, there’s magic to it.
The trick is to see not each run but each run in aggregate. Without that perspective, we become lost in the significance of choices; we give into the rituals that deprecate into mere superstition.
On the other hand, the trick is to see every run as significant. Without that perspective, we become complacent and slipshod; we give into the pleasure of letting each day slip into the next.
So obviously, the trick is to grasp and balance the tension between them. That is love, and that is hope, and that is knowing that perfection is right outside our grasp, and will remain so.