A Stopping Point

It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness. Viktor Frankl

He isn’t sure when he started running. He only knows that his legs are tired and his feet hurt. Time, he’d found, was like the wrong end of a snapped rubber band. The longer you played with it, the shorter and more painful it seemed.

The wind and the dirt and the scorching sunlight don’t wear you down, he would have said were there anyone around to listen. No, it’s not those things. What wears you down is the “next.” The next turn, the next corner, the next goal, the next victory. That one little adjective punctures a life, leaving tiny, cruel marks in the flesh every single time you let it get to you.

Running from next to next to next—that’s what puts blisters on your feet. But he’d forgotten how to slow down, much less stop, in his endless pursuit of something else. He’d forgotten the sound of seagulls, and waves on the sand. No, those were sounds he played on an electronic device he used to sleep at night. Unless he was in the mood for crickets, and that was an entirely different story.

Truth is, he didn’t even think he liked running. Not really. It was a strange way to travel, if you needed to travel anyway.

When his heart finally gave out on him, it was almost a blessing. The needles weren’t fun, or the wires or the drugs. But at least he could see things now. The world looked different from a stand-still…or in his case, a lie-still. Sit still. Stay.

He stopped, and life caught up to him. He had spent all his time chasing something that was three feet behind him, trying to catch his eye.

He couldn’t name it, not even here with the waves crashing for real, seagulls swooping and calling and leaving messes on the dark, wet sand.

But it had found him, finally, when his heart lost its taste for something more.