How do they work their magic?
It was a weekend that involved threading my running through various social commitments: a wedding on Saturday in D.C. allowed for a quick half hour run when I arrived home; time with visiting relatives on Sunday required careful apportioning of the long run, Sunday mass, and visit, so as to balance all the priorities--added to the mix was that it was raining Sunday morning as I set out, and the forecast was for more rain. Would I have it otherwise? No. People with full-time jobs, spouses, and children have trained for and run marathons. Some of them are elite athletes, but even those whose times won't get them anywhere near the Olympics have found ways to keep the flame alive, to keep training on days when it gets hard. My difficulty always with a full schedule is that I believe so strongly that good running should not be rushed--by which I don't mean that it shouldn't be fast, just that the ideal run should have at least some cushion of time preceding and following it, whereby to prepare for and then absorb the gifts the run has to give. Rushing through a run so as to get on to my next appointment can diminish the experience. But it doesn't have to. For me, it's a matter of relishing each second--or (as a man I encountered at the trolley stop this morning reminded me) each breath.I try to breathe it all in, the spicy/minty smell of the grass near the running track, the groundhogs that dive into holes when they see me looking at them, the feel of tree bark. For a half hour or two hours, it's there to be relished. Even the rain creates a peace, a sense of shelter. Toward the end of yesterday's two-hour run, I stepped onto the high school track, the drizzle turning into a downpour, and I had the track to myself after a while, and remembered the words to the Fred Astaire song, "Singin' in the Rain" and "Dancing Cheek to Cheek." And I was in heaven, the rain my baptism. When it came time to leave the track for home, I tried a few of the bounding exercises, but my legs were somewhat leaden by that time, so my attempts lacked the grace of Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers. But no one was looking, and I was free to try, free to dance in the rain--free to be a work in progress. Still, I wonder how they did it, how they executed such a complex set of steps and spins so easily, so naturally, as if they were children at play.
In the last stanza of his poem, "Among School Children," Yeats writes,
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom, or the bole?
O body swayed to music, o brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?*
Yet as I watched the Olympic Trials on tv, I wondered whether there was not so much an absence of pain or despair or "blear-eyed wisdom" as a transformation of it. When Fred and Ginger take the stage, when Alan Webb stands on the starting line, when the violinist picks up her bow and plays the first note, when the gymnast stands poised to take flight, what we see is the magic, not the hours of preparation, the choices made that bring on insomnia, sore muscles, bruises and callouses. The track trials were interrupted for the announcement of the US women's gymnastics team. A group of 13 young women in warm-up suits waited for the verdict--with a cut to these girls during practice, deeply engrossed in the business of preparation, chalking hands, repeating movements ad infinitum, then back to the group as names are called--and the magicians step forward--teen-age girls, very human, very fragile, their faces full of anticipation, dreaming perhaps of Olympic glory or the time when perhaps they can freely eat a Ben and Jerry's ice cream bar, the life in which they're so immersed, a life of harder choices and sacrifices.
Yet...We are "such stuff as dreams are made on," Shakespeare writes in The Tempest (IV, i, 156-157)
But there is truth in the magic that Yeats evokes in the last four lines of his poem. Perhaps you remember when you spent hours struggling with a problem--whether it was how to run a mile faster or meet a deadline at work or finish a painting that "needed something" but you didn't know what. Perhaps after struggling for hours for a solution to your problem, you finally set it aside, trusted the work you put into it, and let go of control over it. Then perhaps something clicked. Perhaps you started that breakthrough race knowing it was going to be a breakthrough race. Or you dreamed you saw the unfinished painting finished. Something has come together that both partakes of all the labor pains, yet is independent of them, is its own creation.
The labor pains and the magic dance together to make happen this new creation. When each step hurts, think beyond the hurt, and remember the magic. When you feel the magic in you, the power you never knew you had, thank yourself for the courage to move through the pain and past it, and thank the power that infused you, awakened your dreams, kept your glance bright.
----
* William Butler Yeats, Selected Poems and Two Plays, ed. M.L. Rosenthal (Macmillan, 1962), p. 117.
posted by DPMcManus @ 12:19 PM
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