Nothing makes me more convinced that time and space are relative, than running the last 10k of a marathon. While the 6 marathons have all had unique experiences, the last part of the races have all shared a similar phenomena to varying degrees.
I believe a couple things start to open up during our runs. We begin to drift and settle into a trance of repetitive footfalls, breathing, and a lull of the speed of our vision the sights passing in our periphery. Mentally, we go from quick passing miles filled with adrenaline and optimism, into a drone of steady lapse during the middle of monotonous miles, until we start to hit, fight, and make our way through and beyond "the Wall." It is here where I have felt, along with countless other runners who may testify to the existence of what seems to be almost another dimension of the aforementioned shift of experience in time and space. I cant speak for all people, or even for all times of any given runner, but nonetheless having experienced this relativeness of our universal constructs shifting, where - time seems to almost freeze into a singularity of moment, and distance seems to stretch well beyond our conditioned experience of measurement, going through these final stages we come out on the other side of the finish line a new believer into worlds just beyond the veil, only entered through pain, trust, faith, fatigue, and strength synergized between mind, body, and spirit.
It was while listening to Audrey Assad's Joy of the Lord as I mowed the lawn today, that I began to muse on a collective thought from her words in the song, "The Joy of the Lord is my Strength", along with the pastor's reading in church today from Colossians 1:11, "being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance with patience with joy." As goes with most spiritual wisdom in the vein of counterintuitive-ness, it's not through an extraordinary portion of might or power that God gives, demonstrates, or teaches us in his showcase of strength, but it's through the ways of enduring, staying with, patience, faith, remaining, abiding, that we tap into and reflect and showcase the strength of God....that ultimately changes our trial into a joy, that is the result of a higher transformation, one that leaves us new and better, where as if we only were wielding the strength of God for our own advantage or short sighted, immature request to begin with. And so it goes, we come out of the refiners fire a better version or our self than we could dare even dream to ask going into our tribulation, trough, or dark night, that once again gives credence to God's ways being higher than ours.
the last thread that weaves into this post is drawing on the concept of time. Spiritual teachers of most traditions, including Christianity, will share that it is in the present that we can find peace. The hurt or pain of the past, and the anxiety of the future are not where we would be advised to spend our mental time. Reading C.S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters, he writes: "The Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is unknown, UN-Realized. For the past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays."
When you are hitting the wall in a marathon, as time slams to a halt, and the miles stretch on like a never ending horizon, the only friend you have is the present moment. It's as if we have reached a point in our bodily and mental fatigue that has stripped away all unrealities, shedding the unnecessary weight mentally and spiritually that we can no longer bare to carry, that we come to a stark and sober clarity of the present that gets us through to the finish. Recalling what we've accomplished thus far will either leave us with regret of how we went about getting to this point of pain, or a sense of pride of having done enough as is it, that those thoughts could derail us, just as much as thinking of how far we still have to go, and how we ever are going to get there, questioning how it ever could be, is also equally as dangerous. The mantra becomes "one foot in front of the other" in a lock step of present moment that eventually we find that finish line tape.
the strength we find in our endurance of the race in a marathon, or the just as real analogous 'marathon of life', is where we ultimately find our joy in the completion of being carried through by coming face to face with the present. There isn't a strength to achieve patience, but patience is the achievement of strength. amen.
