When something horrible happens,
like the bombing at the Boston Marathon, really, all we can do is to keep on
doing whatever it is that we do.
I’ve lived in Boston for 13 years.
And what I like to do is to run and to write. So I thought I’d share my thoughts about what happened last
Monday.
What’s good in the world
Running, to me, is a distillation
of all that’s good in the world.
In the past six years, I’ve run 15 marathons and logged about 40 miles
almost every week. Running has
become the center point of my life.
It is my hobby, my drug, my religion. It is the reason I travel, the way I socialize and my reason
for getting out of bed in the morning.
When I run, I feel physically and mentally invigorated. If I run in the morning, everything I
encounter during my day is just better.
Running is simple and easy and natural. All you need is a pair of shoes. All you have to do is walk out the door and go. Instructional running books mostly try
to teach you to shed your adult inhibitions and run like a five year-old.
And a marathon, to me, is
everything good running has to offer, times ten. It’s a travel destination, a way to explore a new place and
to become fast friends with strangers.
It’s a competition, but without any of the chest thumping and machismo
of most sports. The only adversary
is gravity, wind and your own physical and psychological limitations. It takes a lot of hard preparation, but
anyone can do it. If you go out
and run, and then run a little more and a little more again, you can do a
marathon.
I’ve never run the Boston
Marathon. I’m too slow to qualify,
too squeamish about asking for money to get a charity bib and too
rule-following to be a bandit. I’ll
do it someday. But I watch it
every single year. My favorite
place to watch is just past the finish line. I like to watch the expression on the runners’ faces the
moment they stop running. In one
instant, they shift from almost unbearable pain and exertion to complete
euphoria. There is virtually
nothing in the world that makes me misty.
But I often lose my breath and get teary looking into the eyes of some
anonymous Joe slowing to a walk after crossing the finish line, who I don’t know
and who I will probably never see again.
Our friends Bob and his wife,
Barb, from Colorado, stayed with us this year for the marathon. Leslie and I got Bob all set up –
walked him through the expo, drove him along some of the course, made him a
pasta dinner, dropped him off in the morning at the bus staging ground and sent
him off with some nip-guards, Gu, a throw-away sweatshirt and wishes for a
great race. Leslie and Barb
studied the course map, plotted out places to watch and cross-referenced them
with Bob’s expected pace to make
sure they would have time to get from place to place to see Bob a few times
during the race.
At dinner the night before the
race, we were joined by Heather and Gail from New Zealand. They were 50 and 70 and had run 15 and
33 marathons. Barb and Bob have been friends with Leslie since they were
kids. Heather and Gail were
perfect strangers. They were
acquaintances of neighbors, looking for a meal the night before a
marathon. We were happy to have
them. That’s just how it works.
Marathon Monday
I was tracking six runners during
the marathon – Bob, Heather and Gail, my friend Shawn from Ithaca, my morning
running buddy Tim, and Wendy, a Canadian lawyer I had met at a business
breakfast the week before the race.
I left my office at around noon to go down to my usual spot past the
finish line. I had to be back at
my office for a call and left the finish line half an hour before the first
explosion. Bob finished the race,
picked up his medal and bag and found Leslie, Barb and Leslie’s friend Daryl at
the family meeting area. They were
walking towards the T when they heard the loud explosions.
Then everything went
berserk. No need to recap the
details; the whole world saw it on TV.
We tracked down all the runners and spectators we knew. They were all fine. We all met back at our house. For the next four days, like everyone,
I stayed glued to my computer monitoring news, Facebook, Twitter and
e-mail. It was heart-warming to
get messages of concern from what seemed like every person I had ever met.
You can’t spend too much time
worrying about how things could have been different. If my call at work hadn’t been pushed up an hour, I probably
would have hung around longer at the finish line. If one of the people killed by the bomb had seen a better
spot ten feet away, they would probably still be around today. But that’s how it works. There are a thousand different paths you
can take every second of every day.
But of the infinite possibilities, every life is just one single
unfolding of events. There’s no
looking back.
What’s Evil in the World and What do we Do About it All
Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
did something so incomprehensibly horrible, it’s hard even to process. If the evil behind the marathon bombings
lies in these two individuals, then we’ve accomplished everything we need to –
capture or kill them. The precision with which the
police and military machine was able to identify and catch the two bombers was
hard to fathom. It took three days
to find photos of them, five hours to identify them and 29 hours to kill and
capture them. I’m not a big
military booster, but I was floored by how effectively the police and military
were able to complete the task that had to be done.
But if you look one slight bit
below the surface and start thinking about what makes people do the things they
do, things start to get a whole lot more complicated. To say that every person is a manifestation of the
influences that surround him, and of whatever happenstance circumstances happen
to show up on the scene is not just a hippy-dippy, bleeding heart new age
Buddhist mantra, it’s a reality. We
got the guys, but the guys are just symptoms of a disease. And it’s my opinion, for better or for
worse, that the disease is not something for which there will ever be a
cure.
The rote platitudes our leaders are
obligated to spew – justice will be served; evil will be conquered; the spirit
of our community will never be repressed – don’t resonate with me. And while I understand the need and
desire of some to show solidarity and demonstrate to the world that we will
carry on as always, those kinds of sentiments don’t move me.
Tomorrow’s terrorists will
unfortunately not be deterred by seeing today’s terrorists brought to
justice. And they will not feel
defeated by knowing that they have not broken our will. So what do I think? Just keep on
keepin’ on, I guess. And
what do we do? If everyone got
more cuddles, would that rid the world of evil. No, but it would be a small step in the right
direction. The elements of good
and evil are out there in the world.
Some of us are lucky enough to be born in a good time and place with
good families and positive networks and somehow manage to absorb some critical
mass of all that is positive. And
some of us just aren’t. Some of us
will absorb all that is evil. I
don’t think there will ever be an end to the terrible, incomprehensible
atrocities that people commit.
So there’s good and bad. And we can each decide on any given day
which we think has a leg up. Tragedies will strike and individuals will do
horrible things. I will keep
running. Boston will stay strong
and proud. And the universe will
continue to unfold in whatever way it will. We’ve all gotta keep doing our thing
and try, when we can, to enjoy the ride.
That’s what I think of Marathon
Monday and that’s what I think of the world.
