focus as stupefaction

When my dad passed in March, I signed up to run the Crescent City Classic 10k as a little tribute to him. He ran the race several times in the late 80s and early 90s. My sister and I wore the CCC race t-shirts as night shirts when we were little.

Since the Classic earlier this year, I’ve increasingly gotten into running. It has become a daily ritual, even when I’m on the road. The shoes always go in the bag. I’m not training for a marathon, just doing a local 5k every few months, and I’ll do the classic again next March. 

The mindset that arises in you or surrounds you or occurs to you when you’re running a long way at a challenging pace has come back to me, especially on the days when I haul myself to the practice track in City Park and do the dreaded interval workout. When I’m using my consciousness to my advantage during these runs, instead of letting it drag me down, my mind gets very flat. My language gets clipped, blunt, and abstracted - I’m not naming, analyzing, or arranging things outside myself. I’m chanting, mostly, and not even in rhythm with my strides. The correspondence between inside and outside narrows to the point of nonsense. Phrases like “in the pocket” “this is the race” “toes” “melting miles” “i get to do this” - I repeat one of those in my head. 

I run better when I do this. I choose a sort of blindness. I deforest my vocabulary. I chant in a clearing. I run.

I’ve started to think of this as an experience of focus. And this has made me think that focus is a form of stupefaction. I am numbing myself to most things around me. And the numbness corresponds with a dumbness - my language isn’t threading me in some complex mycelial way into the infinite phenomena around me. It’s a clave keeping time.

A strategy is a focus. Focus stupefies you.

Rumelt helped me see that good strategy, sometimes, is no strategy at all. You may be in a season where diversity, nuance, improvisation, randomness will serve you. When you choose to have a strategy, you are opting out of those.

This choice might matter even more than which strategy you choose.

-eric