[Long] Run Under the Sun

So much of my life has been a full sprint.

Not just in the literal sense — though there's that too — but in the way I've always moved through the world. Fast. Forward. With purpose and not much patience for stillness. I have always found real pride in using my body to get somewhere, and my mind to do the internal work in the process. The two, for me, have never been separate. Movement has always been where I think best.

Some of my fondest memories as a teen and college student are long runs in the heat of a Mississippi Delta summer — dirt roads stretching out ahead of me with nowhere particular to be and all the time in the world to get there. Those roads wound between cotton fields, connecting one patch of land to the next, dust rising behind me with each step. Sometimes it was just me in 100 degree heat, a tractor idling somewhere in the distance, and a few high school friends earning hourly wages chopping cotton under a wide, unforgiving sky. There was something clarifying about that kind of personal work, that kind of heat. Something that stayed with me.

For much of my life, running was my primary method of finding myself — and occasionally, losing myself, which turns out to be just as necessary. During travels, I ran along the Malecón in Havana as the salt air came off the water and old cars drifted past like something out of a dream. I ran the trails of Colorado with thin air in my lungs and mountains filling every edge of my vision. I ran the West Side Highway in New York City, the river beside me, the skyline doing what New York skylines do, glistening in the morning light and twinkling in the evening light. I ran the walkways along the water in Georgetown, early and quiet, before the city had fully woken up. Thousands of times in my adopted city, I have run the Battery in Charleston, where the harbor opens up and the light does something different depending on the hour.

Every small town and city I have ever loved, I have loved first on foot.

But something shifted in my forties, a decade ago.

It didn't happen all at once — it rarely does. It crept in quietly, the way most important things do, and by the time I noticed it, stillness had already started making a case for itself. I began to learn how to sit in it. How to stop treating a quiet moment like something to be solved or escaped. How to be present in a way I had never really allowed myself to be before, because there had always been somewhere else to be, something else to run toward.

Some of it was the body. The body, at forty, has its own mechanics and its own opinions. It will tell you, plainly and without much sentimentality, that you cannot simply and randomly run ten miles on a Tuesday with no preparation and no consequence anymore. That the rules have changed. I had to listen — really listen — in a way I hadn't when I was younger and could outrun most things, including myself. So I slowed down. And in slowing down, I started to hear things I'd been moving too fast to catch.

Some of it was a deeper commitment to my own wellness — a deliberate, unglamorous reckoning with what I was putting into my body and what I was asking it to do in return. I cut out alcohol, dairy, sugar, processed foods. Not as punishment, but as a kind of devotion. A promise I made to myself that I intended to keep. Rehabbing a forty-year-old body back to full health is patient, quiet work. It asks you to show up consistently, without fanfare, and trust the process even when the results are slow.

And perhaps most profoundly, I was learning the art of the edit.

Not the kind that happens on a page — though I've always loved that kind too — but the harder, more personal kind. The forced pruning. The slow, sometimes painful process of eliminating people, places, and things that no longer belonged in the story I was trying to tell. Some of those edits were chosen. Some were made for me. All of them, in time, turned out to be necessary.

What I found on the other side of all that stillness, all that subtraction, surprised me. There was more room. More clarity. More of myself than I had known what to do with when I was always in motion.

I started this life at a full sprint. And I will never stop loving the feeling of moving fast, of covering ground, of arriving somewhere breathless and alive. But I have learned — finally, gratefully — to tune in to the moment. To sit in stillness without flinching. To know in my bones that I do not always have to take a run in the sun. Sometimes the place worth reaching is right where you already are.