On this day, I quit...

Ok, let me be more specific. The morning carried with it remnant of the two evenings before including a very bad accident that had I not looked down for a split second I would have witnessed. though the sound of air bags being deployed (three sets/three vehicles four people/ 1-1-2) is a sound few forget hearing. I will tell the complete story in a future post. But for now I will say that I quickly found myself running to the scene to find that no-one had checked on one of the victims in a car in which a young woman was still inside, head over the steering wheel and FULL of smoke. She apparently had not been wearing her seatbelt and was un-responsive, low respiratory rate with a rapid/weak pulse with no signs of having been subjected to the force of an air bag. INTENSE. Really INTENSE. So much for posting the whole story later... I stayed with her till the Raleigh Fire Department took over.

Anyway, It turned into a late night and none to positive. On to today. Guess that I could easily whine enough for a home bottling company to make a few bucks, but I just found myself in a place that I wanted to quit. Everything. So I did. I gave myself time to "Re-Set" or "Re-Boot" by stretching good getting my running clothes on and just stretch out a few miles (4.2). Now I know that that is nothing compared to some of you, but for me. This mid-morning did exactly what I needed it to do. Cleansed me in a way that only a decent run can.

Awesome.

Update: The young lady turned out, was treated and released sometime in the early morning hours...

Ok, Enough...

I am alive and for the most part healthy, thank God. But I admit I feel that I say at least part of this with some reservation as I will spare you the drama and just say that I have had some real personal challenges over the past three weeks or so. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the words of the late George Sheehan found me through a podcast this morning: "...It is a gamble I must take. No one can substitute for me in deciding for myself in deciding on my life. No one can think for me, nor needs too. "Of the common man" Emerson said "What Plato has thought, he may think. What the saint has felt, he may feel. What has befallen any man he may understand." This is my ball-game to win or loose and what I must deal with is not luck or chance, but choice. It is choice that is omni-present in life not chance. what I can see and feel and almost taste is choice. Choosing myself, my values, my universe. Choosing my own drama, my own life, my own heroism. Seeking through imagination and reason and intuition that unique something that I and no other, am here to do. No one ever said it was easy or safe. We have no contract with life. But neither are we here to simlply avoid pain and enjoy pleasure. At sometime or another I must leave my childlike experience. I must chance it and risk the contentment. Knowing that to be re-born I must first be ejected from paradise and knowing also that I may never come back that I may wonder forever in search of a self I will never find. Yet never being able to return to the easy theologies, the painless salvation I left behind. I want no other choice. In this game, the only sure way to loose is to sit it out." -From the book "Running and Being" by George Sheehan


Yah, I know It's pretty deep. The guy just had a view from his own life experience that reaches a part of me as if to say, "Hey, all of this crap... It's normal, it's called life, deal with it. Right now, guess I needed that.

Run long, DC