LIFE AS A HUMAN

Tarmac Meditations #7 — Note to a Friend on His Long Sought and Now Imminent 24hr Run

Tarmac Meditation #7 — March 14, 2010

What makes a man is the act of taking a step…then another step…it’s always the same step…but you have to take it. Antoine de St. Exupéry said that, by way of my dad, when I was an unhappy, drifting 17 year old and I asked him what he read when he was my age.

I could not figure out how to talk with him so I thought if I read what he read when he was younger, we might meet up. It was about as close to him as I ever got, home to a sadness that lives on to this day. The words though, the times they came from, the way in which they came to me, shared as they were with equal parts love and exasperation, illuminate an abiding faith in the human spirit. These are from him to me to you, to any of us who set out not knowing the why of things but only that it is time for the doing of them.

Knowing that when a friend is running out beyond his comfort zone, we are together wherever else we may be. It is always one step, then another — a journey from where we were to wherever we are going that enriches all of us.

WE, all of us, are going with you. We will be alongside you, up ahead in the uncertain dawn…the inspiration and the giants of which you speak so often as though they were somewhere else, are you, and we are grateful.

Photo Credit

“Bill Running, San Francisco, 24hr” courtesy of Michael Lebowitz