Running Versus Cycling: a guide to choosing your major
Cycling is great. Running is great. Writing poetry, fiction, nonfiction–we don’t need to pick or choose. We don’t need to narrow. Ever. Even though the Registrar will tell us we must put down one answer.
Cycling is a like long relationship. Its pleasures are subtle and steady, sometimes dramatic but most often just gently going-along glorious. Cycling takes up time and room in the day. And there is the bike part of biking: this entity that has needs and desires of its own, and requires care and knowledge and affection. I feel married to cycling. The joy and the shackles.
Running is a hot date. I love running. It’s so low maintnance. It’s selfish thing, a fling: I just run out the door. See ya! No one even needs to know I am doing it. Running doesn’t need anything from me. It’s intense and overt and quick. It’s slower than cycling, but it feels faster, because the whole system is involved. There’s no intermediary, no bike. A great feature to running: you don’t have to understand tools. My dog runs alongside me, grinning and breaking into song. He knows it’s more than just good to run. It’s necessary: neurosis is completely erased (sometimes for days). I am completely uncommitted to running. I squeeze it in. But I can’t think of anything that makes me more happy. Last night, after running, I was overjoyed for hours and this continued, even though I went to Meijer. Like a great date, running makes my jokes funnier and I can sleep. Running doesn’t need me like cycling does. Running says now is fun.
I don’t want to choose.
It’s like writing in this way. I was asked in an interview recently if I was really more of a poet or a fiction writer. (Running, or cycling?) In each case, I think the thing we love is quite a ways behind the front of the thing. (The initial urge to move.) The initial urge to utter, to notice, to say Look, this is like this. I am not a fiction writer or a poet, really. Like all artists, I make things, mostly out of words. The energy used to make these things comes from the same sense. (And is absolutely refreshed by physical activity.)
So I’m thinking today about my students, stressed over choosing majors. And how choosing feels wrong when it narrows us. But not when it expands us, our ability to go deeper. And how there are so many ways we can keep alive our love for all our subjects, all our passions.
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