The .Plan

Oh, my. How fragile we are. With highs forecasted to reach into the 80s and 90s, they are issuing an “excessive heat watch”.

…EXCESSIVE HEAT WATCH IN EFFECT FROM WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH THURSDAY EVENING FOR THE CITIES OF SAN FRANCISCO…OAKLAND AND SAN JOSE INCLUDING THE SANTA CLARA VALLEY…

A SIGNIFICANT HEAT EVENT IS FORECAST TO DEVELOP BY WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON WITH RECORD OR NEAR RECORD BREAKING HEAT POSSIBLE FOR THE URBAN AREAS OF THE GREATER SAN FRANCISCO BAY REGION. AFTERNOON HIGHS ON WEDNESDAY ARE FORECAST FROM THE MID 80S TO MID 90S AND THEN WARMING FROM THE UPPER 80S TO UPPER 90S ON THURSDAY WITH MORE RECORD TEMPERATURES POSSIBLE.

I love the heat. Brings me back to the days of running (and wilting) in the good ol’ Ohio summer heat.

Life was much simpler back then.

A new study by some German researchers provides the first in vivo evidence that release of endogenous opioids occurs in fronto-limbic brain regions after running, and further that this is correlated with self-perceived euphoria. (Too bad this doesn’t really happen for me.)

Dr. Boecker and colleagues recruited 10 distance runners and told them they were studying opioid receptors in the brain. But the runners did not realize that the investigators were studying the release of endorphins and the runner’s high. The athletes had a PET scan before and after a two-hour run. They also took a standard psychological test that indicated their mood before and after running.

The data showed that, indeed, endorphins were produced during running and were attaching themselves to areas of the brain associated with emotions, in particular the limbic and prefrontal areas.

The limbic and prefrontal areas, Dr. Boecker said, are activated when people are involved in romantic love affairs or, he said, “when you hear music that gives you a chill of euphoria, like Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3.” The greater the euphoria the runners reported, the more endorphins in their brain.
–Gina Kolata, “Yes, Running Can Make You High”, New York Times, March 27, 2008

Give to the winds thy fears,
Hope and be undismayed.
God hears thy sighs and counts thy tears,
God will lift up,
God will lift up
God will lift up thy head

Leave to His sovereign sway
To choose and to command;
Then shalt thou, wandering, own His way,
How wise, how strong,
how wise, how strong
How wise, how strong His hand.

Far, far above thy thought,
His counsel shall appear
When fully He the work hath wrought
That caused thy need,
that caused thy need
That caused thy needless fear

Through waves and clouds and storms,
He gently clears the way;
Wait thou His time; so shall this night
Soon end in joy,
soon end in joy
Soon end in joyous day.

It has seemed like ages since I’ve been able to run outside in short sleeves. Tonight, while running through Golden Gate Park in the still, cool, 58-degree air, I spent the time thinking about data-generating processes while listening to salsa divas La India and Celia Cruz. When you run with your headphones during the daytime, you don’t really miss the loss of your hearing, because you can compensate with your vision. But with my vision slightly impaired by the blackness of the night, I keenly felt the loss of my hearing as I studied the cyclical lengthening and shortening of my shadow as I passed the lampposts one by one. As you pass each lamppost, the shadow your body casts in front of you becomes progressively longer and longer until, approximately 2/3 of the way to the next lamppost, it disappears; the light from the lamppost in front of you generates a more intense light than the lamppost behind you, and your shadow is now cast behind you. At that point, if a hidden mugger were to attack me from behind, I would not be able to hear him sneak up on me, nor would I be able to see his shadow.

It was 65 degrees today. I looked longingly out the window.

Online registration for the 2008 course is officially open!

(top to bottom = east to west)

I.

The sun was shining brightly today. Certainly worth a five-mile loop through Parnassus Heights, the Golden Gate Panhandle, and Golden Gate Park Loop. And worthy of a new running mix.

Downhill / Outbound:

1. Survivor - Eye of the Tiger
   
2. Fort Minor - Remember the Name (feat. Styles of Beyond)
   
3. Wyclef Jean - Fast Car (feat. Paul Simon)
   
4. Lenny Kravitz - Where Are We Running
   
5. Clipse - Ain’t Cha (feat. Re-Up Gang)
   
6. Common - The Game
   
7. Nas - Carry On Tradition
   
8. Mike & the Mechanics - Over My Shoulder

II.

Earlier this month, the storm of the century (well, the worst storm to the hit the area since at least 1996) left more than a million without power, grounded airplanes and closed highways, and dumped more than 10 feet of snow in the Sierra Nevadas. The after-effects of all this chaos are still evident in the Golden Gate Park Panhandle: telltale splintered branches betray the violent gusts experienced by many of the trees, and the jogging path is nearly impassable, covered with fallen branches, dirt, and litter.

When I was out running yesterday evening, I saw a solitary Chinese middle-aged man raking leaves and sticks into little piles. This particular section of the park was littered with maybe 3 or 4 such piles. He didn’t have a uniform or badge to make him look like an official city employee; so I presumed he was just an area resident looking for a way to get some exercise and do good at the same time. I didn’t think much of it at the time, only that it seemed like a pretty good exercise plan.

Today when I went out for another run, I saw the same man doing the same thing. Who could tell he had been there diligently raking the day before? Things didn’t seem any tidier or more manageable. The same chaotic morass of branches was still there. The jogging path still required careful navigating in parts. It was still a complicated mess.

But this brought a smile to my face, briefly. If I can find time to go for another run later this week, I just might see him again.

And someday, the panhandle might not be such a mess.

III.

Uphill / Homebound:

1. Caedmon’s Call - Only Hope
   
2. Jars of Clay - I’m in the Way
   
3. Hillsongs Music Australia - To You
   
4. Chris Tomlin - Holy is the Lord
   
5. N.W.A. - F*ck Tha Police
   
6. Sonic Flood - I Could Sing of Your Love
   
7. Nicole Nordeman - You Are My All in All
   
8. Bone Thugs-n-Harmony - Change the World

I.

When Marsha Linehan began, in the late 1970s, to use cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) techniques to treat her patients with borderline personality disorder, she noticed that there were a number of problems with implementing CBT in such a setting. Many of her patients were highly disturbed in the sense that they suffered from severe emotional dysregulation and a lack of skills to self-soothe and manage these emotions. They often existed in one of two polarized states: a rational state of mind in which they completely suppressed their emotions, and an emotional state of mind in which their emotions tended to hijack their observational capacity leading to gross cognitive distortions in thought and experience.

It turned out that CBT’s unremitting focus on change was too invalidating a modality for many of her clients. Linehan began adding, in an eclectic fashion, new strategies to CBT, eventually producing what is now called dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT). One of the central elements in the skills portion of DBT is its emphasis on helping someone to achieve a certain level of detachment from her experience, to learn to observe and describe and eventually to have a certain type of awareness in the moment, so that she is not so overwhelmed by her emotions.

II.

As it turns out, you can also achieve this state when you go running.

Or dancing. When you are whirling to Jerry Rivera or Frankie Ruiz, you aren’t thinking about what happened last month, or today, or about what will happen next year. You aren’t worrying about what time you have to wake up for the next conference call. Maybe you are dimly aware of how freely your hips are moving, but there is no mental Microsoft Word of uno,dos, tres… — left to right — cinco, seis, siete… — cross body lead… It’s just you and the follow, all the better if you have the groove and she catches it, and then things just start to happen. And there’s nothing else to do but enjoy the moment. Quiero cantar de nuevo y caminar! / y a mis amigos buenos visitar / Quiero cantar de nuevo y caminar / Y compartir mi libertad!

All week long, I’ve been in the lab / wit’ a pen and a pad, mixing music for a grand celebration. And come Saturday, there will be a four-hour joyous reprieve that will stand in the gap between hope and experience. This soul is exhausted and begging for rest.

I.

Going for a long run on little sleep and when your lungs are full of gunky secretions is arguably ill-advised. At mile 3, you can no longer suppress the coughing, and you try to muffle your breathing whenever you pass other joggers so that they cannot hear your wheezing. At mile 4, your sobs of frustration mingle with gasps for air. The only thing you can really think about is the next step in front of you, the next crack in the pavement, and soon the run becomes consumed by those thoughts, all the way until you reach mile 5.

Yet on the next outing you push yourself to run faster, farther — thinking that if it’s not difficult, or time consuming, or painful, then maybe it’s not worth doing.

II.

When I first encountered Stanley Hauerwas in 1997 through his book God, Medicine and Suffering (a.k.a. Naming the Silences), I was struggling to believe what I had been taught in my ethics courses about how genuine moral reflection required intellectual struggle to resolve stated quandaries in rational fashion while generating consistent principles that could in turn be universally applied. Over time, and with the help of the Duke Mafia, I came to see that life ought to look very differently: not as a series of intellectual problems to be resolved but rather as embodied in the practice of specific habits and practices.

The Amish have adopted a posture of yieldedness (Gelassenheit) to God and to community through the cultivation of daily practices of vulnerability, trust, and interdependency. This theological worldview was shoved into the national spotlight last year when Charles Roberts, a milk truck driver, systematically shot 11 schoolgirls — wounding 5 and killing 5 — from the West Nickel Mines Amish School and then took his own life as police descended upon the building. Half of the 70 people who showed up at his funeral were from the Amish community, and their continued acts of mercy to the Roberts family continue to astonish the world. For the Amish, the commitment to forgiveness is not cheap talk but an embodied practice that permeates all of life.

One cannot embody practices without learning them, but how does one learn?

To cultivate prudence one must have courage and temperance. But to cultivate temperance one must have prudence. It is mind-bogglingly circular, and with more complex virtues it is an impossibly tangled web. But Hauerwas taught me that we learn through imitiation and habit; that is, Christianity is not “beliefs about God plus behavior” but rather a calling to membership in a different community with a different set of practices. You lean into lament. Following God is no longer a matter of generating theoretical niceties and theologizing away lament but rather about committing to these practices and learning this craft in the context of community.

Sometimes fidelity to these practices — focusing on the next crack in the pavement — is the only thing that can sustain us during times when we feel nothing but the silence and absence of God.

There was something triggering about the experience.

Maybe it was the morning dreariness. Maybe it was the distinctive verdancy of the grass this morning, accentuated by the moisture, starkly set against the slicked, grey pavement. Maybe it was the elderly Chinese gentlemen in the Golden Gate panhandle practicing tai chi, slowly, deliberately, and thoughtfully.

The more I think about it, the more I think it was the musty smell kicked up by the raindrops pattering on the ground.

Order my steps in your word, dear Lord
lead me, guide me everyday
Send your annointing, Father, I pray
Order my steps in your word
please order my steps in your word
– “Order My Steps”, sung by the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir