Listening.

Steamfitter, by Lewis Hine.

For about twenty years, I was an avid long-distance runner. 

Having had a father who had his first heart-attack at just 39, and a second at 44, I started running so I wouldn't follow in his stolid infarcted footsteps. 

Soon, I started speeding up my footsteps. And wearing cheap canvas Converse sneakers, I'd course a mile in needle-strewn Riverside Park, then two miles and longer. 

Slowly I began to enjoy running. I liked the alone time, the concentration and the mind-wanderingness. I liked that I lost weight. And I liked, that I could set goals for myself, train appropriately and meet those goals.

Before too many months of running, I started running marathons. There are longer races, of course, but 26.2 miles, 42 kilometers is maniac enough for me, and I never raced any further.

Thinking about running and my life today, which is as an old man who makes his living at a keyboard, what I most learned from running was a way to listen to my aches and pains.

What I most learned was Nick Adams'-esque. That there would be good days and bad days and in-between days. But that you would always be in the day you were in, until that day was yesterday, and then tomorrow, it would be that day again.

I learned from running that on the good days you temper your enthusiasms by reminding yourself that tomorrow might feel like a steep incline. And that on bad days, well, they're inevitably  counter-balanced by a good day.

When you run marathons, that good/bad battle can take place amid all sorts of increments. You can have good/bad days. Good/bad races. Good/bad miles. Even, and no, I'm not exaggerating, good/bad yards. Every section of every moment or distance can be parsed and analyzed. Your wind can feel deep and strong while your right hip hurts, as mine aches all-day and all-night now.

What happens when you train for something is you acquire--beyond all else--listening skills. You hear what's going on with your self. You have an understanding, an awareness and a depth of knowledge as to how to handle a million-and-fourteen different situations. Mostly because you have handled them before.

Last week, I was well-paid to rewrite a couple thousand words of website copy for a startup with all the foundational solidity of an amoeba. To make matters worse, those thousand words were all in a google document and I like working in google docs as much as I like losing a filling in a molar.

H, the woman who manages GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, was blithe and oblivious about all this. Like a spectator at a six-day bike race, like the kind they used to have around European velodromes in the 1920s, H observes the action, not the pain. She sees me going around and around without hearing the crunch of bone on bone or the snap of a tired sinew.

That, in a nutshell, is why the best choreographers used to be dancers themselves. Or the best race car drivers know how to fix their machines. They have an understanding of the mechanics of the movements they're demanding. That's why most project-managers and administrators suck. They want things fast but they never actually have to find those things themselves, or physically chisel letter-forms in marble. 

They want the dance move without knowing the strain. Or the tremolo without knowing the tremors.

But that's where if you've trained a lot, your listening comes in. I had those thousands of words to clarify, euphony-ise and otherwise improve. I dreaded doing all that, but I knew that each word I faced was just another footfall in a race that's 20,000 or 10,000 or 30,000 footfalls long.

That's what most people--certainly most agencies, where the average age of creatives is just 31--don't understand. 

Let's finish these footfalls with Nick and Ernest.

“He had already learned there was only one day at a time and
 that is was always the day you were in. It would be today until it was tonight and tomorrow would be today again. This was the main thing he had learned so far.”

That's not an easy lesson.

Nick Adams learned it in the north woods as a teenager. 

I learned it in a beige cubicle in front of a Selectric.

It's listening and observing the needs. Listening and observing the pains. Listening and observing the self. And knowing how to handle the yesterday, the today, and just maybe, the tomorrow.