This is probably something that should not cause me to laugh out loud, but it is.
Andy Baio is one of my heroes. Internet heroes, really. His is one of the better RSS feeds I get.
I found out tonight that he belongs to Metafilter. I don’t belong; I just read along. There’s a section, here, that show some of his highlights, things people consider to be their favorites. For whatever reason, this one caught my eye:
Have you ever looked back upon a prediction or perspective you had many years ago about how things might turn out in the future and realized how simplistic your prediction was and how uninformed it ended up being as time churned forward over the days, weeks, months, years, and decades, and the events of daily life over that time gobbled up your issue and chewed it up with the zillion other things going on and made it look much differently?
And I’m not sure why it caught my attention, either. I think it has to do with my view of the world: I tend to live in the now. Looking back, I can’t think of any prediction I have ever made. Ever. I’m not interested in what might happen, probably because I am both busy with the now, and because there are too many options for the future, too many variables.
I’m still running. I think I mentioned that. I trained for and ran a marathon, to say that I did it, but I’m still running, when there’s no next marathon scheduled. A guy at work asked me if I will run another one; I said yes. He asked me if I was training hard so as to run it faster.
I was almost speechless.
I realized, quickly, that I would not want to run one faster. I enjoyed the 4 and a half hours it took to run the first one; if I did it in three hours, I would feel cheated. It is the experience, the here and now, that I enjoy so much. The ritual of doing, the act itself.? I’d like to train to be stronger, so that it hurts less after the marathon, but I sure wouldn’t want it to take less time or to be any less of an experience for me.
So, that is what I have been sinking.
