Learning to Walk, Learning to Run

Like most people, I don’t remember learning to walk. It’s just something where it seems as though I’ve always been able to do it. With my kids, the range was nine to thirteen months. It’s one of those things that humans seem born to do; how crazy it is to see how small and helpless a newborn is and to know that in the space of a year, give or take, this child who can barely lift his head is going to be running around the house, getting into everything!

I’ll bet that most of the time, most people don’t think very much about how they walk, they just do it. And yet, there’s a lot of information in a walk too; what a person may be up to, for instance. My friend Allison and I figured out in high school that there’s a certain type of walk a woman can use in a busy city to indicate “Do not bother me”.

Yet, I don’t think it ever crossed my mind that there were better ways to walk. It’s just putting one foot in front of the other, yes? And then I started running.

Mind you, I never got very good at running, and I suppose that technically, I was doing more jogging than anything, but it was a cheap and easy way to get some exercise in. This started in Germany, where there are all sorts of little paths between the trees and along the fields, and there happened to be a loop basically right outside my door that was almost exactly one mile in length. (Ironic, considering they’re all on metric!) In any case, I’d do the loop, and as I got better at it, I started doing the loop two or even three times, and I even sort of enjoyed it.

After I moved back to Chicago in 2006, I started running sometimes, and I had certain “loops” I would make of different lengths. One of my favorites was a 5-mile loop I had put together (which, not coincidentally, went by three Orthodox Churches) and I was getting good enough at this that I could run it in about an hour.

It was finishing up one of these loops one night that all of a sudden, I felt the coordination between my feet and my legs and the rest of my body come together. Now, it wasn’t so much that I was lifting up my feet, but I had the feeling of my legs hanging from my hips and the propulsion to go forward stemming from momentum there. I was nearly home, but it clicked, not just in my body, but in my brain that if I wanted to run, this was a better way.

Finding that rhythm wasn’t always easy, but when I could, it was amazing how running just happened, and how there were times when I would purposely have to break out of that so I could catch my breath. What I also noticed, though, was that there was a lot of times I’d be searching for that rhythm, find it, and then break out of it again for no apparent reason. I suppose some of it was natural resistance – I don’t think I’m a naturally coordinated person, and so sometimes I think it was the uncoordination battling against the more coordinated running – but sometimes it really did seem like it was a mental thing, that my brain was trying to tell my body that doing something well was putting me in danger because there was a little bit of the sense of self-propulsion here, that my brain was no longer quite as “in control” as it would like to be.

I’ve done little bits of running (or jogging) since, but with kids, I did a lot more walking. Walking is fine, too, but it’s not quite as important to try to stay as coordinated, I guess.

I don’t know. I was walking the other day, adding in armswing, and once again, felt the sensation of the whole body trying to find a rhythm together for a more efficient walk. It’s elusive, but I keep trying. I came back tonight after two miles feeling like I’d done more than just slapped my feet against the pavement over and over; I was breathing deeply and I could feel my heart pumping.

If you had told me as a teenager, though, that there was a better way to walk than what I was doing, while I was uncoordinated enough, I don’t want to say I would disbelieve the person, I wouldn’t have thought that learning to do this had any real value. After all, I could walk since I was a baby, wasn’t that good enough? I think a lot of us are like that. Then, sometimes, we touch something on that deeper level and realize that there’s a lot more there than we realized.

I think something similar happens to a lot of people concerning religion. I think that for many people, religion is something one “does” because it’s like walking – we have a predisposition to doing it. However, for a lot of people, that’s it. There’s nothing deeper than, say, some belief that God exists, trying to be a “good” person, and maybe having a vague sense that heaven and/or hell could possibly await us after death. It certainly isn’t nothing, but it isn’t the type of faith, say, that motivates one to stand up against evil. I’m never going to be any sort of championship runner, but even with the little I have done, the experience that there’s more than just putting one foot in front of the other is eye-opening. To understand that people train in such a way that their bodies come into coordination enough to almost self-propel is more than a little weird, but it’s kind of the same thing that many people find in the spiritual life; it becomes so much a part of them that they even breathe it in and out, like a runner in a race, that training brings them to a place that most of us can hardly fathom exists.

When we see people who are very, very good at what they do, Olympic athletes, for example, it’s easy to kind of write them off as people for whom sports are easy. It’s too easy to forget that although these people do have God-given athletic talent, that talent had to be accompanied by an incredible amount of dedication, hard work, and training. None of them woke up one day and decided, “Hey, I’m pretty good at this, I’m guess I’ll go to the Olympics to see if I can win something.” Somewhere along the way, they probably also got coached in things that they “already knew”, including running and breathing. All of it comes together to create an athlete who inhabits this deeper realm of athletics all the time, they really can’t not do it. Therefore, it probably shouldn’t be surprising that reaching a deeper level of relationship with God is not something someone can just do without practice. And, of course, there’s our own clumsiness and resistance that shows up when we do practice, but slowly there’s progress and the changes that come upon us as a result of that.

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