Running Makes Me Happy.

When I was in third grade, I was picked on a lot at school. I was nerdy, and my classmates thought it was cool to beat me up. My father was an alcoholic, and he and my mother argued incessantly. Though they both showered me with love and supported me in every way possible, I felt responsible for their fights and at the same time helpless to stop them. In a word, I spent the majority of that year angry. I would go to school angry because I knew what faced me there. I dreaded recess because I knew I would be beat up on the playground. I was angry after I was threatened, and degraded, and battered. When I rode the bus home, I was angry in advance at the fights I knew would happen between my parents. And when I lay in bed at night with my pillow over my head to block out the sounds of yelling from downstairs, I was angry with my parents for fighting.

                   

As a third grader, I was ill prepared to deal with these emotions. I just didn’t know how to handle them. But my mother had learned something about me that I didn’t yet perceive – running makes me happy. I’m not sure how she decided that this was the case, but whenever I was walking around the house kicking holes in the drywall because I was so angry (yes, I really did this), she would send me outside to go for a run. We lived in the country. Our nearest neighbor lived on a farm down a short lane from where we lived, and we couldn’t see the next nearest house, so it was ok for my mom to send a third grader out for a run by himself.

               

               

               

I would leave the house fuming. About everything, not least of which the fact that I was being forced to go outside when I would much rather stay home and destroy things. My body was shaking with anger, and, when I got outside, the energy came flowing from my feet. I would run as fast I could. I ran down the lane past the neighbor’s house. My Sears outlet sneakers pounded the dirt road leaving a trail of dust behind me. Past the barn and onto the path between cornfields. My lungs burned. My feet became bricks. My legs turned to jelly as I ran and ran. The path wound for miles (or so it seemed – I have no idea how far it really was, but it seemed like forever to my seven year old feet), but, gradually, the pounding of anger in my temples subsided. I began to notice the color of the cornfields shifting from green to golden in the slanting yellow autumn light. I began to hear the red-winged blackbirds and the killdeer scolding me as I ran past. I began to notice all the beauty surrounding me. I decided that it would be a good idea to catch the grasshoppers on the side of the path and watch the spittle bubble from their jaws. I went looking for snapping turtles in the sunny spots around the pond where the path ended. And then I would just sit. Free from the anger that oppressed me in the world in which I was trapped at home, I was overwhelmed by the beauty and the immensity of the world around me. I stared at the sun reflecting off the ripples from frogs jumping into the pondwater as my breath slowed and my thoughts became clear again. The sound of the crickets and cicadas made me feel a part of something larger than myself, and I gave thanks that there was a place just for me in it. A place with no arguing parents, no hooligan classmates. A place for just God and me. After a while I felt satisfied again about my place in the world, and I would start a slow jog back home, knowing that all those things that surrounded me with anger didn’t really matter in the bigger world of which I was blessed to be a part. I was happy.