Not-Real Time
This morning I ran the Peachtree. As unique and discrete experiences go, you can’t beat it. Last year it didn’t happen. (It was virtual and I have a t-shirt, but it wasn’t THIS.) It starts with a car race to the train station with the other runners from my area (because we are the only people on the highway before six in the morning on a national holiday). The train cars fill with racers. There’s some quiet chatting about weather and stops. We all get off at Lenox and move as one- a murmuration of strangers- some with running partners, but many, like me, alone. But not. I am so not alone it makes me giggle to myself like a weirdo.
Standing in Buckhead with ten thousand other people, stretching on curbs, taking pictures, athletically milling (until you cross the starting line, as far as these folks know you could be as swift as the falcon, so try to look like it while they still don’t know), I was struck dizzy by a time skip. It was as though last year never happened. It was as real a feeling as being touched. I felt it briefly this past May on my deck with friends, unmasked, drinking wine and laughing; but today it stayed with me. It felt like I’d jumped lanes into a parallel time. I was aware of the devastation and the crippling loneliness in the lane beside me, but that wasn’t the lane I was in. In my lane, everything had always been normal because the experience I was having felt unbroken.
Is this what traditions do for people? Being unsentimental, I am careless with traditions, but that callousness has shortsighted me. Because our time-travel is constant and involuntary, the traditions are a rest-stop. We need some time on the access road to be in repose from uncertainty and fear and the relentless requirement of progress.
I am no longer Catholic, but I think a lot about this... For almost two thousand years, at every moment, somewhere Mass is being said. There is never a minute in time that has no Mass in it. For the faithful, what an amazing river to walk into. Alongside, but outside of time, like groundwater.
The upshot is that I have to make space for the rest stops. Not everyone wants to run with me (there’s been a lot of clarity around that). I will make space for college football, for Mass, for sitting on a bar deck with wings and beer. I shouldn’t scorn someone else’s right to-or choice of-a respite, any more than another person should try to force everyone to take up permanent residence in their tradition, no matter how fear-insulated it makes them feel. So, as usual, grace.
(Note: I wrote about this awhile back in http://singingonthetreadmill.squarespace.com/songs/2015/11/25/hello-tom, if you’re interested in my dad’s attachment to tradition.)