So it’s been a minute, as the kids say.
Apart from raising a daughter, who just started fourth grade, is doing well, and will mostly not be in this blog, there are three main things going on with me: running, skiing, and writing. These things are not, it turns out, wholly unrelated.
Listening to the baboon
“It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day — that’s the hard part. But it does get easier.”
That’s what the jogging baboon says to Bojack Horseman, who’s collapsed and gasping in his headband and trainers. It stuck with me. It stuck with a lot of people. And for whatever reason, it was in September of last year that I decided to listen to the baboon.
Why running?
Why now?
I don’t know.
I was never a runner when I was young. I thought getting up early to go running was ridiculous, and I hated when they made us run in gym class. It made my knees hurt. When everyone at Google seemed to be either going to grad school or prepping for a marathon, I chose the former. Running was stupid. I liked riding bikes.
But the baboon, I guess, had gotten into my head. And I needed the cardio. So I started doing it: running every day. I gave myself the day off when I went to the gym and worked out with my trainer, but that was it.
And at first, I was like Bojack: “Ow, crap. I hate this. Running is terrible, everything is the worst.” My knees hurt, especially the left knee where I had surgery in the 90s after trekking in Nepal. Plantar fasciitis made the bottoms of my feet hurt, so I ordered New Balance Fresh Foam X 860 V12 running shoes because lots of articles said they were the best for plantar fasciitis, and to my surprise they worked. The foot pain disappeared almost instantly, replaced by searing calf pain so bad there were a few days there when I could barely walk. And all of this was the result of a mere twenty minutes a day of jogging at a pace so slow that old ladies would stroll past me in the park.
But I kept at it. I’ve become one of those middle-aged assholes you see early in the morning, huffing along the sidewalk in headphones and wraparound sunglasses and Under Armour man-tights. No, it hasn’t been every every day, but it’s been close. When the air is bad, which happens all too often in Korea, I run on a treadmill. When I had a string of lung infections over the winter, I took a little time off. But I kept coming back to it. And it has gotten easier.
It’s gotten so I like it.
I like being outside every day, no matter the weather. I’ve run on frigid days, snowy days, sunny days, drizzly days, days when you could see the fresh snow dusting the nearby mountains, days when you could watch the mist rising off the river and the herons before sunrise. In a few months it’ll be hot, and I’ll run then too. I’ve gone from twenty to thirty minutes. A few weeks ago I upped the pace, so now I feel like I’m actually running, and never mind that my watch tells me I’m doing fifteen-minute miles. Progress is progress.
The top of the hill
One motivation for running was ski season. I’d started skiing two years earlier — not well — and last year I didn’t get to ski as much as I would have liked. I wasn’t sure how it would go this year either, but I wanted to be ready.
Luckily my daughter’s old swimming instructor whom she’d loved was now teaching skiing at Gonjiam, the closest ski resort to our home. Also luckily I had some extra days off. I used them to take my daughter skiing, which honestly meant putting her in her gear — the least fun part of skiing — then waving goodbye and spending a couple of hours skiing on my own.
What I discovered was that the workouts did, in fact, help. My legs and heart were in better shape than they had been. But none of that was going to make me a decent skier if I didn’t deal with the fear.
The fear was bad. I felt it going up on the lift, and I felt it out on the slopes. I felt it whenever I began to pick up speed, and whenever I heard the ominous shush of a snowboarder behind me. I would tell myself that it was now time to point my skis down the slope, or at least a little more downish than they were, but then there I would be, sliding across the slope so slowly, and at such a sharp angle, that each turn was exhausting, and my thighs were wobbly long before I reached the bottom.
Something had to change.
I tried to get rid of the fear. I tried to overcome it, let it go. But the fear was still there. And then one day I had a new idea, which was actually an old idea that I knew from Buddhism and from Landmark: I would make friends with the fear. It wasn’t going away, and it didn’t have to. When I started to feel it, I would think to myself, Hello, fear. Good to see you again! Do you wanna come skiing with me? The fear was there, but the fear wasn’t me, and the fear didn’t rule me.
Did this mean that my skis now pointed downslope and that I was zip-zip-zipping along like an Olympian? No. But I did start going faster. I relaxed, which I have found is an important step in any sport. I started having more fun.
We wrapped up our ski season with a few days at High1, Korea’s best ski resort, out in the mountains of Gangwondo. I started on the easiest slope — we were there with my wife’s cousin, who hadn’t skied in a long time and needed the warmup. Two years ago there was a turn on that hill that I just couldn’t make. I fell every time. Now it was easy.
So I upped it. I went up one of the bigger hills. And that too was pretty easy. It was fun! So I went higher still. And I could do it. And I could enjoy it.
And on the last day, we decided we’d all go all the way up to the very top of the mountain. Riding up, I was nervous. There were green trails all the way down, but this was long, far longer than any ski run I’d ever attempted. There were twists and turns. The whole thing ended up taking a couple of hours — my daughter stopped at a lodge halfway down for cocoa — but I did it, and I would do it again.
And it was somewhere near the bottom, after all the tricky bits, down on a section I’d been skiing every day and knew well, as I was thinking to myself that this was some of my best skiing ever, that I was suddenly on my back, my skis tangled up under me. It happens. If it doesn’t happen, I’m probably not trying hard enough. It took me a while to get up and get back into my skis, but I was fine.
So what about that damn India book?
OK, so the book. Regular readers of this blog (Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Sorry.) will have noticed that I stopped posting capsule reviews. I’ve still been reading, but these days the writing is mostly going into the actual book itself, which is now well over 300 pages. There will be a lot of editing, but I have discovered that I do in fact have a distinct voice for this book, and that there really does seem to be a story there. It’s also interesting the extent to which I’m discovering what it’s about only by writing it. If it were a novel that would have been obvious, but because it’s a memoir, I sort of thought I knew what it would be beforehand. But it’s only in the writing of it that I’ve found the meanings and resonances.
And so I need to keep going. I’ve started work on the trickiest bit, which is all the stuff about the history of the idea of India — the cultural constructs that put India into my head in the first place — but that, I think, still needs more research. There’s some tangled-up thing involving Voltaire, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, German Aryanism, and the long history of European anti-Semitism. How to put all that in, in ways that make sense, is proving tricky.
But progress there is, and progress there will be. It’s like the running: you have to keep doing it. And it’s like the skiing: you have to make friends with the fear. Will anyone ever read this book? It has no gimmick, so how will I even publish it? What are my comps — the other books that my unique book is supposed to be like, but not too much like? How will I fit all the pieces together?
Keep doing it. Point the skis down the hill. Go.