Keep on

My friend tells me he and his young daughter have taken up running.  I can hear in his voice an excitement about that fact and what it means. Three times around the Chestnut Hill reservoir and another quarter way and back add up to 5 km. The girl took the challenge of running first and now her father, to support her and to challenge himself, has joined in. Once, part way around, she pleaded to be allowed to stop, but he  urged her to keep on: 'If you stop now, you might not start again.'

This last weekend, climbing in the White Mountains--hours trudging and scrambling up and down rocky trails (I know the Whites)--his daughter was the youngster who complained the least.

Embodied cognition is a flourishing philosophic field that explores not just how we enlist the body in the mind's projects but also, among other things, how the very ways we think and feel are derived from our physical experiences with the world.

This dynamic integration however has its obstacles: mind says 'yes' and the body, stiff, slow, pained, resistant, says 'no.' The daughter's first joggings resulted in breathless panting and sore muscles, the body expressing a strong reluctance to extending its range. Who's in charge here?

The body as a donkey digging in its heels is an old analogy, often ending in the story of some kind of animal abuse. Indeed I have at times shown disdain for this body of mine, and abused it. It has sometimes trotted forward and come to enjoy the collaboration; at other times, its compliance has led to painful slow-healing damage. When it stubbornly refuses to take another step, I have sometimes berated it as traitor, malingering servant, pitiable weakling, and I've sneered and railed when it takes its time recovering. But the body remains here, though perhaps dismayed.

I know my ambitions. What are my body's?  New sensations, pleasant sensations, the harmony of all the parts, rhythmic repetition, the alternation of exertion and rest, good fatigue? I know my body loves to lope, to stamp, to dance. It has its own memories of flinches and flutters, though we share a nervous system. It has its own expressive configurations or postures, which affect my attitudes. Perhaps it is eager to further my intentions; perhaps it has its own I'm not listening for.

But like an old marriage, my body and I have delighted and disappointed each other too often to mention. Our fates are tied together inextricably, though it may be that one will abandon its aspirations before the other.

Perhaps the moment on the path when my friend's daughter wanted to stop, when the protest of the body was heard but overridden, was just one more episode in the complex life-long encounter my friend's daughter has, has had, will have with her somatic self.

In the meantime, father and daughter are in training together for a race somewhere soon on the North Shore. Keep on.