Running Again

The end of the first week of the new year is upon us.  This hopefully brings with it an end to those dumb news fillers like “Best of 2015” lists or "How to keep your resolutions in 2016."  I say “hopefully” because I want to spend time sharing my own dumb filler about one of my resolutions.

First, let me go on record saying that I think the whole notion of New Year’s resolutions is silly.  It is predicated on the idea that we are displeased or unsatisfied with who we are at the given moment and the turn of a calendar page provides us the opportunity to renew, recreate, or otherwise reinvent ourselves into who we would like to be from January 1 to December 31.  Yet the calendar year is an arbitrary period of time for self-improvement.  Each day marks the end of a 365-day cycle (or a 366-day cycle every four years.)  Thus every day provides each of us a years-worth of opportunities to remake ourselves during the coming 12 months.  That being said…

My friend, colleague, and fellow Mexican Intellectual, Frank Gaytán, wrote recently about the connection between running and writing when describing his renewed commitment to his own authorship efforts.  And while Frank and I indeed have recommitted ourselves to our blogging and other writings, I also am recommitting myself to my running.

I registered for the Chicagoland Half-Marathon challenge last October.  The challenge is to complete two half-marathons, one in May and the other in September.  I decided to run both races for a couple of different reasons.  One is simply that I enjoy participating in distance races like these, as I have written previously.  Another reason is for improved physical well-being as I find myself in the thick of middle-age, which has contributed mightily to my middle spread.  Finally, 2015 was a difficult year for me and completing distant races in the past always gave me a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.  I figure experiencing those kinds of sentiments again would be better than wallowing in self-pity about the year gone by.

To be clear, I do not intend for any of you to interpret what I write here as moralizing as to why people should exercise more or as inspiring to encourage others to embrace new challenges.  I am simply stating that I hope the coming months of training will provide me with some new insights to explore further the kinds of ideas I have explored previously in this space.  If you have read The Mexican Intellectual up until now, I welcome your readership in the coming months.

Postscript: Preparing for a distance race has a funny side every now and again.  As an older runner trying to complete today’s five-mile training run in the midst of Chicago’s snowy, weekend weather, I felt like someone out of Rocky Balboa.  I will leave it to you to guess with which character I most identified.  Hint: It was not the dog.

Writing Again

I have not written for this blog in over a year. The last time I posted I wrote about doing what you love and how this really sets one up for frustration because few, if any, of us have the luxury of only engaging in work that makes us feel emotionally fulfilled and happy. There are awful parts of nearly every activity—even to make an omelette you must crack some eggs. Sometimes we just need to do the activities rather than think about all of the negative things associated with them.

While I tend to be introspective, sullen, contemplative, and wallowing in the existential—I find that when I simply focus on the behavioral, rather than all of the emotions and thoughts and internal conflicts that go with getting work done, that I am much more productive, and after the fact, happy. Another way of putting it is to “fake it ‘til you make it.” Do what you have to do, force a smile while doing it, and once the task is accomplished, no matter how distasteful, you can walk away feeling satisfied. There is actually quite a bit of research to back up this approach and many psychologists, social workers, and therapists implement it with their clients.  Being a psychologist and a social worker (who has actually worked briefly as a therapist, been in therapy and who is married to a therapist), one would think I would know better.

Instead, I have spent the last year and a half wondering why I can’t write more, something I enjoy accomplishing, but often don’t enjoy getting started on. There is no shortage of topics that I have an opinion or insights about, but frequently I get wrapped up in the depressing nature of the news that I am bombarded with, I become afraid to share a contrarian view, I get discouraged when someone writes something online that is similar, and in my view better written than what I could accomplish, and so I do not write at all.

Much of the literature on writing and how to write generally boils down to one thing: If one wants to be a writer, then one should write. Make the time to write and do it—behavioral; the great ideas and flowery language will follow. The accomplishment and good feelings will happen after the fact.

One area of my life that I have very effectively taken this behavioral approach is in running. As the Taoist saying goes, “the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.” If you want to run, then run, one step at a time, and the accomplishment of travelling a certain distance, however far, will eventually follow. There was an article recently published in The Atlantic that argued that running and writing go hand in hand. This past year I have run two marathons and a half marathon. In training this year I have run 733.6 miles. I know this because I have kept track of my running with an app that logs my miles and then posts them to social media.

Therein lies the second aspect of a behavioral approach, the reinforcement of behavior. The first step is to engage in the behavior and then the second step is to reap the reward. For me, simple and narcissistic person that I can be, it is simply having people “like” my run on Facebook, or being able to publicly share that I ran. And with that I am motivated to run more.

I run even though many of the miles are actually painful in some way--gasping for breath, pain in my joints, a stitch in my side. Even being a somewhat seasoned runner, getting started is still hard, and keeping the behavior going, one foot in front of the other, mile by mile, requires a level of concentration and that takes work. But it happens; while never easy, it gets easier.

And so now, less than an hour ago, I typed a word on the screen, and then another and another. And right here there are 662. I plan to write more and I know my writing partner René does as well. And we hope you’ll read—and like or even dislike some of what we produce. Just let us know that you’re out there and we’ll keep it up. That’s all we can do.

I feel better already.

Long Time No See

The start of a new calendar year as well as a new academic term provides an opportunity to return to writing for The Mexican Intellectual.  The obvious question to emerge, however, is why I was missing in action in the first place.  There are a few inter-related reasons that I wish to share with you now.

Mental fatigue: One aim of this blog has been to comment on the issues of the day in a timely and relevant fashion.  Among some of the news dominating public attention during the last quarter of 2014: 1/ events and protests borne from racial tensions between civil authorities and the communities they are sworn to protect resulting in the loss of life and ongoing tensions, 2/ airline disasters resulting in the massive loss of life, with at least one still unresolved and another with international geopolitical implications, 3/ the spread of a deadly disease with international geopolitical implications resulting in the massive loss of life and paranoid reactions to those committed to stemming the spread of disease and loss of life, 4/Charges and counter-charges of sexual abuse involving college students, university administrators, and a legendary celebrity.  At times, it was too much for me to take in, let alone to think of anything novel to say about any of it without thinking that I was adding to the cacophony of voices rather than providing any clarity.

Insecurity: Part of this stems from my observation of mental fatigue, namely that I could not or would not have anything new to say about the state of the world or the human condition that would be worth saying without it adding to the numerous voices already speaking.  Further, I thought that no one would read what I wrote anyway.  This spring will mark three years since my colleague and I launched The Mexican Intellectual, and while I touted the number of page views on the first anniversary, I admit that I have become discouraged with the numbers since then, which has prompted me to question the point of the entire endeavor.

Fear of writing: This is borne of my insecurity.  To put it plainly, I discourage myself from writing; convinced that what I write will not be very good or that no one would read what I have written even if it has any merit to it.  My fear of writing obviously is an irrational one, and I recognize it as such.  Nevertheless, it exists.

So what am I to do?

Several years ago, I was a contributor to a short-lived alumni blog for my alma mater (which unfortunately is no longer available.)  I devoted one entry to confronting the challenges of writing a weekly blog.  At the time, I found inspiration in George Orwell’s essay, “Why I Write,” in which he outlined “four great motives for writing.”  These are,

(1) Sheer egoism.  Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death…
(2) Esthetic enthusiasm.  Perception of beauty in the external world, or … in the words and their right arrangement….
(3) Historical impulse.  Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
(4) Political purpose… Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.

These four, Orwell states, “exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living.”

These are worthwhile motivations for writing and, to some extent, were the bases for starting The Mexican Intellectual in the first place.  While I struggle to accept the fact that not everything I write will  be brilliantly perfect or perfectly brilliant, I hope at the very least that some of the things I have written already or have yet to write provide readers the opportunity to contemplate and discuss ideas from a different perspective.