When I don't know where to go,I run

When I hit a wall - when I genuinely don't know where to go or what to do next - I go for a run.

It's a way for me to healthily engage with the conflicting parts within me that pull me in different directions.

Something about the rhythm of it - my feet on ground, my lungs working, my senses awake. At least I can find my grip on the road, if I cant find it anywhere else.

Perhaps it's also because I move in one direction for a while, that clarity about other directions opens up? I'm not sure.

I know that in surrendering leadership to my body for thirty or forty minutes allows my mind to quieten and rest from it's efforting.

I used to think this was about exercise, and maybe it is. But isn't also about depth?

A way of going down and into what I have been hitherto circling and sparring with.

When unsure of our next step we spend a lot of energy looking for it. Scanning, planning, asking people, reading things. And the compass needle can keep spinning.

But the needle settles when we stop trying to force it. When we step away (or run away) and give the body something to do, the deeper knowing catches up.

We can match our energy of frustration and confusion with rhythm, rather than noise.

A run is, in its own way, an act of depth. An act of rhythm. Contact with what's actually here. A meeting of our shadows on the ground of our choosing.

Purpose tends to find people in those moments too.

I wonder if this has anything to do with why people go on pilgrimages, when their life path vanishes before them - they take themselves to the land, to a path and a rhythm they can touch, a fold in the earth they can, even for a night, inhabit, and be inhabited by. I suspect that's part of it.

Whatever takes us deeper beneath the surface noise, where silence beckons, where we go back to being.