Wind

February 26, 2018

Greetings from the mistral,

It feels like wind has an intention, that it rolls across the frozen earth with some purpose, looking for weak things to test. 

I left home saying I didn’t want to know the windspeed.  I could hear it in the trees, feel it coursing around the house, and I knew it was serious.  Later I found it was nearly thirty miles an hour, gusting to forty.  Left to my imagination I rated it much higher.

I reconsidered my sixteen-mile course, knowing half of it would be into a headwind.  Around me the gusts crashed like surf among the trees.  I thought the words that have transformed many adventures into calamities: ‘How bad can it be?’  When I turned into it the wind nearly stopped me, took my breath away.  I was moving forward at barely a walking pace, so surprised I laughed, curious now to see what the answer to my question was.

The world is taut from the wind.  Trees ache to lay down, houses strain, power lines sing in panic.  The wind makes music through the narrow places, a keening to warn other vertical things it is coming.  It is relentless except to gust an extra burst of humiliation for a westbound runner.

I try closing my eyes, first one then the other, both watering and blurred.  Tears barely make it to my cheek before they are gone. I run by flags being tortured on their halyards, humiliated and misshapen.   “This might be what quitting feels like.” I think.  I am staggering forward, the wind has placed its hand on my chest to suggest a different posture. 

In the open farmland the wind is bolder, reckless and arrogant, gathering speed where there is nothing but corn stubble to slow it.  It’s hard not to take this personally.  I am grumbling, cursing the wind, and adding other complaints that have nothing to do with it.  I have a lot of time to think about it since my progress over the roads is painfully slow.

The wind is shredding the clouds now, ripping holes in the grey blanket, and columns of light make their way through the breaches.  Trees are bent and creaking in surrender, there are whitecaps on the puddles in the ditches.  I notice there have been no birds in the sky.

It feels like I am wrestling a living thing.  The wind flails at me tries to trip me, whips around and attacks from the side.  I struggle to keep one foot from colliding with the other.  An hour and a half passes doing my trudging zombie impression on the two lane roads.

And then I turn east, and I am changed by an invisible ally, lifted and propelled, the friendly hold urging me toward home.  I am rescued from the abuse, the torment, and I can hear it encouraging me as it presses me to run faster.

The wind?  How can this be the same wind?  This cannot be the same animal that was torturing me, threatening to push me into the dirt.  My legs are light, gliding across the blacktop.  I am powerful again.  I take more than my share of credit for my pace, flashing by shrubs that bow in homage to my athletic prowess.

Then there is a line of low trees and the wind relents and gravity reasserts itself.   I can feel the ache in my legs for a moment, until the wind comes back and gives me strength again.  I soar across the last six miles, smiling, wondering at how the world had changed.

What occurs to me this morning is how much I take this experience for granted.  The challenge that makes me stronger, and the gift that lifts me.  And that they are part of the same thing.

Often, as a runner, I think of the wind as either for me or against me.  But as far as we know the wind has no intention, it simply is.  It is the same wind no matter what our intentions, or our direction.  The only thing that changes is how we are when we move through it. 

We find ourselves in circumstances that are not always our choice or our doing.  Sometimes it is the hours that pass too slow.  Sometimes it is an illness.  It may be the end of something wonderful or the beginning of some journey with an unknown destination.  The lesson of the wind is to understand that wherever we find ourselves, there is the potential for challenge or a gift.  Sometimes it is in the same thing, and it is only up to us to discover what to make for ourselves.

Hope this finds you tacking,

David

Copyright © 2018 David Smith