[lover]

"And you can fly
High as a kite if you want to
Faster than light if you want to
Speeding through the universe
Thinking is the best way to travel" ~~~~Mike Pinder The Moody Blues


2006 was a year of continuous travel. Since January 4th, my life has been a barrage of Delta sky miles, Hilton and Marriot points, per diem meals and American Express transactions. Some would call it an exciting lifestyle, and it often is. But it would be a far better one if airport security was less stringent, flights always ran on time, and hotel accommodations were consistently as advertised. It's an enjoyable existence in many regards, but it comes with many bumps in the road, and air pockets in the sky.

The hard cold reality is that the airports want you to arrive two hours early, merely so they can delight in advising you that your flight is going to be two hours late. Once you finally arrive at your final destination, you learn that suitcases don't always disembark at your destination on the same flight as you do. Mapquest doesn't always succeed in getting you from the airport to the hotel in an unfamiliar city, and once you do get there, the hotel doesn't always have the non-smoking room you reserved weeks in advance. Sometimes, they don't have any room at all.

Commercial travel is a necessity in my line of work, placing me squarely at the mercy of others, but there is another kind of travel, the journey of the mind's eye, which I have a little more control of. For me, destinations of the psyche have always been most easily accessible through running, the vehicle of perfect travel where there are no delays, skies are always blue, and I never get a middle seat sandwiched between two people who are on their way to the Guinness buffet eating world championships.

At the beginning if this year, my mental travel agent must have been on an extended vacation, as I found that my thoughts were not taking me to sunny destinations. I seemed to not have any desire to run any longer than three or so miles. They were all rocky miles, and were not fun. At the time, my running was kind of stale. I'm not really sure why, but every time I went for a run, voices emanated from the back seat of my mind, repeating the mantra of any child in a hurry to get to someplace exciting- "Are we there yet, are we there yet, are we there yet?" It took everything in me to even get out for a run, and once underway, all I wanted was for each run to be over. The running never escalated from my labored legs and breathing to my free stream-of-conscious ness thought.

It got worse from there. From February through mid-April, I was on an overseas assignment where I didn't run a single step the whole time I was there. It was ironic that I was over 10,000 frequent flier miles from home, but my running had shut down like a failing airline suddenly engaged in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Although it was an amazing travel experience, my running stayed home in the states. I didn't run, and as a result, my mind travel was grounded.

When I arrived back home in Mid-April, I started sporadic running again, mustering a slow mile or two here and there. It was like learning to walk again. Every step was labored and my body was too acutely aware of the unwelcome weight gain and the painful and physical act of running to allow my mind to wander. For most of the rest of the year, my physical weekly coast to coast travels preempted any real opportunity to experience the mental Bernoulli Effect and simple momentum transfer in the air flow of my mind to allow liftoff.

But if you can change your thoughts, you can change your world. And when your mind is right, it can take you wherever you wish to go, first class, turbulence free and on time every time. Running is the only means of transportation that can get me there. Some call this the elusive "runner's high" but I call it my escape to reality.

One of the things I have always enjoyed about running is the seeming union of mind and body, and when it all comes together, I feel like a well oiled instrument. When the human machine is clicking on all cylinders, running becomes a mystical, magical travel experience where there are no blackout dates and miles never expire. It's a feeling of such total absorption of thoughts that the whole rest of me is just along for the ride. There is no effort, no struggle, and no outside awareness of anything, including the act of running itself.

It just is what it is.

Or at least it was. But for some unknown reason, this feeling suddenly escaped me, and so my passion, and even my desire for running dried up. It continued this way for what I was afraid would be forever. How do you recover a lost passion? You have to change your mind.

In early December, the joy of running started to return. I can't tell you what the catalyst was, any better than I can explain why the passion left me to begin with. But it started to return during a trip to San Francisco , where running started to feel good again and the scenic beauty was like oil seeping through to the rusty gears in my mind. It was during that week that, for the first time all year, I found that each day, I was looking forward to my next run, and expecting it to happen.

The next two weeks, I was working in Houston , where I discovered that running in a usually crowded downtown area before sunrise allowed me to own an entire city with a different self guided tour each day. As was the case in San Francisco , I got out every day except a couple when I chose to rest, and found myself looking forward to each next run. My body was reuniting with my soul, and I was reconnecting with running. And the words started flowing again.

I finished up 2006 at home, where, even though I've had the joy of sleeping in my own bed every night, I've been traveling every day, taking a new journey of the mind during each run. I finished up the year yesterday with a simple three mile trip reflecting on the year ready to end and the new one only hours away. We closed out the year with friends and family.

In about three hours, I'll be lining up with about a thousand other runners for The Atlanta Track Club Resolution Run, my first run of a new year. This year, I have not made any New Years resolutions. For the past month or so, I've already been resolving to evolve a little bit each day, with a simple goal of being a better person today than I was yesterday. Any day you chose is a great day to start.

Words are flowing out like
endless rain into a paper cup
They slither while they pass
They slip away across the universe - John Lennon