A Sunrise Run on the Beach—One Lasting Moment?

I’m not sure what the most difficult time in my life was, but a strong contender is the six months of so after I moved back to US after living in Japan for two years. We had been warned about “reverse culture shock,” but I think what I experienced was more concrete and measurable. When I moved back, I left behind one of the best groups of friends I’ve ever had, and within a few weeks efforts to keep up a long distance relationship of some kind with the most serious girlfriend I’d had to that point also fizzled out. I started earning a lower salary teaching at a Catholic high school in Indianapolis than I had as a teacher in Japan, and, compounding that, I needed to buy a car and start paying for gas and insurance, while in Japan I had gotten by on my bike, public transportation, and the benevolence of my friends. I had to stop doing judo two nights a week which, along with the bike thing, meant I lost my main forms of exercise and started gaining weight rapidly. Honestly, what hurt most of all though was that my life got a lot less interesting—- in Japan, everything I was doing was novel and exciting, I was a novel and exciting person to almost everyone I met, and when I talked to my friends back home they all recognized what a novel and interesting experience I was having. After I became an underpaid high school teacher renting a one bedroom apartment in a boring part of a Mid-American city, all of that stopped being true. It sucked.

And one of the things that really hit me once all of those changes happened was that to me, my old life in Japan felt very real, like I could just walk around the right corner and it would be there. But of course it wasn’t, and there was no way for me to step back into that life. In fact, I knew that I would live the rest of my life without ever encountering anyone I knew from that time (twenty years later, this remains the case). Within a short time, it started to feel less like all my experiences there had happened to me and more like they had happened to a cousin or something and then been described to me in detail. If I could never go back there, could never be that same person again, had it really been me who those things happened to?

Anyway I got pretty depressed, deciding to start smoking for some reason, then had to quit smoking, eventually built up some friends, eventually started dating my future wife, eventually found a better paying job, etc. And now, the memory of that awful time in my life is walled off from me in the same way—- I know the details of it pretty well, but it might as well be an experience that someone else has summarized for me. Putting aside the fact that I don’t want to, there would be no way for me to step back into that period of time.

When my wife and I got married, we did out honeymoon at an all-inclusive resort in Jamaica. We spent months planning the trip, and then spent one glorious week there having fun in the sun, eating and drinking ourselves stupid and having a great time. At one point in that trip, while I was walking across the beach, the thought popped into my head with total clarity that it was so strange that I had spent all that time planning the trip and thinking about it, and soon it would be something that had happened in the past that I could return to, but right there in that moment it was actually happening. Maybe that sounds obvious, but I really felt it in that moment—- the weird recognition of the fact that every moment in your life is moving past you inexorably. We live with it all the time, but, probably out of necessity, we don’t take the time to think about it.

Anyway I’m on vacation with my family this week in Gulf Shores, Alabama (part of the fun of being married to another teacher is that we are able to take some nice family getaways). And this morning I went for a run on the beach, basically at sunrise. It’s been a cold, rainy Indiana for the last six weeks, especially so starting right about the time I took my walking boot off and started working on getting back in shape. I had today circled on my mental calendar for a while now. And this morning, I did it! I ran almost three miles on the sand, out and back, past the fishermen and other early risers but really just me and my thoughts and the sun and the waves and wind. It was amazing, everything I’d hoped it would be as a running experience. And when I finish running, I stood on the beach for a few minutes and took some deep breaths and let a feeling of contentment wash over me. And then it was over and time to do the next thing, and now that moment is already receding into the past. I’ll get a few more runs in while we are here, and they will no doubt be great in their own way, and then we’ll head back home and this trip will join Jamaica and Japan and everything else my my life in the unrecoverable past.

I’m doing this project—- getting in shape to run 5 half marathons in 5 states in one month, raising money for charity, etc—- in no small part because I want the experience of travelling, running unique races, and feeling like I accomplished something meaningful. And at this time next year it will be over and done with, and I’ll be on to the next thing. I can’t do anything about that. So, I’m going to focus on enjoying it!