Today, on my fiftieth birthday, I’ll be running my first-ever 5K race, which fits.
Let me explain.
We spend so much of our early lives trying to arrive: first just to grow up, and then to find that career, that passion, that place to call home, that person to stand next to, that achievement, that experience — that thing, whatever it might be, that will finally make us happy and safe forever.
I’ve been lucky to get a lot of these shiny things, and I’ve enjoyed them in the moment. But the moment passes. Life may pause, but it never stops.
There are, of course, good things that last, some longer than others. In my forties I finally came into a few of those things. I moved to Korea, and it feels like home, and I intend to stay. I met my wife and became a dad, and those are things that will be with me for the rest of my time in this world. But even those things will change with time. The marvelous ten-year-old who pirouettes around our apartment and collects New Jeans trading cards is not the adorable five-year-old who used to put on princess clothes and yowl, “Let it GOOO!” and in the next decade she will be a teen and then an adult, changing along the way. And a marriage isn’t static either: it grows and flexes over time.
And what happens when you get as old as I am, maybe, is that you relax about all this. You stop looking for the Big Arrival because you know there isn’t one — not until the one that stops everything, and that one’s not very interesting. Until then, it’s all just the journey.
And maybe that’s why I’ve taken up running: because now I’m not trying to get anywhere in particular.
It was this past summer, not long after I finished the first draft of the India travel memoir I’ve been working on for the past three years, that I discovered, more or less by accident, that I had become a person who can run five kilometers at a stretch. I was doing my usual thirty-minute morning run, up from the twenty minutes that were all I could handle last fall, and I looked at my watch one day and noticed that I didn’t have that much farther to go if I wanted to make it to 5K. And so I did. And the next day my legs hurt.
I told a coworker about this, a guy who’s been a runner all his life, and he asked if I was going to sign up for a proper 5K. It had never occurred to me, but it sounded kind of cool, and I found one on my birthday, and it seemed like a good and life-affirming way to start my fifties. I can now run the distance a lot faster than I did that first time — not fast, but faster — and my legs feel better under me. And so I’m gonna do it, and try for the best time I can manage.
There is, of course, no real point to this. Most of the challenges we set ourselves are pretty arbitrary, and a 5K you’re not trying to win is especially so. You start somewhere and you end somewhere, and there is absolutely no purpose to traversing the distance in between except to experience the journey. How you experience it, and what goals you set for yourself along the way, are up to you. In other words, it’s a lot like life.