Friday 8/9/24
Something I've learned from running stairs: You have a relationship with the stairs you run. You are not passing by, blowing through; you're there with them, they are there with you. You go up, you go down, up, down. You're not going elsewhere. You share space, time, and place with those stairs. You're there together. You put time in with them specifically.
Out of all of the stairs I run, the stairs of the Monument mean the most to me. They are closest to who I am, who I've become.
In the seven years I've been running the 294 stairs of the Bunker Hill Monument, they've never become easy to me. They're always hard. I know it will be real work for me to do as many as I should, and that's not even necessarily as many as I should be doing on that given day. Some would perhaps put in terms of, "This is going to suck." Pain isn't the right word. I know so much of pain. This isn't that. I don't know what my heart rate is. I don't employ any gadgetry. I can be out of breath for the last 100 stairs but I won't stop. I keep going regardless. As I do, I try to get my wind. I pull up my shorts a bit from the bottom. I put one foot up above the other and then I get there.
I have the deepest respect for the stairs of the Bunker Hill Monument. They remind me of my earthly mortality. I am my work. My work is deathless. But I am here to get to places to assist my work in getting to the people it must get to, and also to create a life for myself during my time on earth that I want and deserve to have. The stairs of the Monument don't so much as cause me to think about death as they serve to remind me of the value of a day, an afternoon, an hour, all that can be done in it--especially, all that I can do in it, which is different than what anyone else can.
I'm able to do what I set out to do on the stairs inside of the Monument, and I have a symbiosis with them, but I also know that I change and they do not. That is, I run past a stair now that, at a different point in life, could be a stair I only get to after a much longer amount of time and far greater difficulty, a stair I may only be able to pass once. It will be the same stair within the same walls of the same place. It will not have changed. But I will have changed.
I don't want to be defeatist. I'm not planning on this happening. Ever. That's partially why I do what I do every day. I do it, too, because of the people in publishing, because of the situation and war I am in, the strength I must have, physically as well as mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, and because when I get my house back in Rockport, when I have my other house on Cape Cod, when I am where I am and the work is able to get to all of the people it should and needs to get to, I'll be able to live the life I want and deserve for a long time. Not six years and then, boom, death. I have a very clear goal of living well north of 100. I make my choices now accordingly. My daily relationship with these stairs helps me along. You are much less likely to backslide when you have a healthy relationship which you are committed to daily. Tending to it daily. Whatever the relationship may be. The same is true of a relationship with stairs.
The stairs of the Bunker Hill Monument are numbered in paint every twenty-five stairs. 25, 50, 75, 100, 125, and so on. As I go up, I think, "Halfway there," etc. If I'm doing a set of five stair circuits, I'll think "Halfway there," too, when I get to stair 150 of my third rotation, but I'm also aware that half-way there, in that scenario, is more than half-way there, which is also illuminating in life. Because I will then power through the next 150 stairs, then I'll come down and that will be two more half-sets of 150, and just like that, in mere minutes, I'll have cut a nice chunk out of that second half. I'm sped on my way and my attitude, and the work I'm putting in, that whole non-stopping thing, is a big reason why. I am both reminded of these truths and always becoming more grounded in them because of the stairs.
When I come down, I never look at the numbers which are now behind me. I fly down, but I keep my hand either on the rail or just above it, in case I fall. I take nothing for granted. I don't assume that I won't or can't fall, despite the seven years of running these stairs and not having fallen going down.
I don't assume. This is more than the physical, this notion of the fall. Be aware. Be grounded. Ask, rather than presume. Don't let the passage of time foster presumptuousness. Be new to the world every day of your life, while still increasing your stores of wisdom, and you will become more alive, and more human, when you first open your eyes to start the new day that has come.
Looking behind me would make me more apt to fall, but there is another idea at play that is well beyond the physical. I do not care to see what I've passed, because what matters is where I am going. It is against my code of belief to look at those numbers of the stairs as I come down. Most other people do it. I hear them doing it. "That was 225." They'll provide two or three updates as they descend.
Meanwhile, I am asking them to step aside so that I might pass. I get to the bottom, and I do not tarry. I hit the ground below the first step and in that same motion, I turn and begin running back up. There's stair 25, there is stair 50, there is 100, I'm 1/3 of the way there, just like that, going past the people again that I just passed moments before.
Stairs are a connector, yes. They take you from down here to up there and vice versa. But that is really the most nominal of their connecting attributes, if you understand stairs, if you have a relationship with them. They connect you to parts of yourself. They connect you with truths in the world and in your life.
Later people will say, "He wrote this and this and thousands of these things that were unlike anything anyone knew a human could do, which the world needed and needs." But what I would also say is, "He ran many stairs, and he understood what each last one of them meant."
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