"The world comes at me with its busyness..." lamented Mary Oliver, encapsulating a need to step aside. To exist without striving.   Comedian John Cleese once noted that home was the place he existed without striving, but I find the opposite to be true. At home there is always so much to do, so many who need me. I am swallowed whole.

"It might be a little silly," admits Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami (born January 12, 1949) in his meditative memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, "I find spending an hour or two a day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring."

Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

As I run, I tell myself to think of a river. And clouds. But essentially, I'm not thinking of a thing. All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.

Like Murakami, I am a runner. A seeker of solitude. I regularly explain my introversion by saying it is not a function of shyness, but I am most comfortable alone.

Rilke urged us to "go into ourselves" and he was right. Aloneness brings space, a dark indigo incognito of space into which you fall gently and swiftly. More than mere solitude, it is avoiding the world's busyness.

For decades, Murakami has found a comforting void while running five miles daily, every day. When I Talk About Running... is a memoir of Murakami as a runner and by extension, a writer.

Best to learn from my mistakes and put that lesson into practice the next time around... This may be the reason, while I'm training for the New York Marathon - I'm also writing this. Bit by bit I'm remembering things that took place when I was a beginning runner more than twenty years ago. Retracing my memories, rereading the simple journal I kept (I'm never able to keep a regular diary for very long, but I've faithfully kept up my runner's journal) and reworking them into essay form, helps me consider the path I've taken and rediscover the feelings I had back then. I do this to both admonish and encourage myself. It's also intended as a wake-up call for the motivation that, somewhere alone the line, went dormant.

[...]

Long-distance running suits my personality, though, and of all the habits I've acquired over my lifetime I'd have to say this one has been the most helpful, the most meaningful. Running without a break for more than two decades has also made me stronger, both physically and emotionally.

Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

The culmination of small, consistent daily actions - things grown piece by piece - forms something meaningful, and before we know it, it maps our life. Murakami admits that existing within a void creates a parallel track of focus that ultimately supports his day-to-day doings.

I'm the kind of person who has to experience something physically, actually touch something, before I have a clear sense of it. No matter what it is, unless I see it with my own eyes I'm not convinced. ... Only when I'm given an actual burden and my muscles start to groan (and sometimes scream) does my comprehension meter shoot upward and I'm finally able to grasp something. Needless to say it takes quite a bit of time, plus effort, to go through each stage, step by step, and arrive at a conclusion. Sometimes it takes too long, and by the time I'm convinced it's already too late. But what're you going to do? That's the kind of person I am.

Echoing Dani Shapiro's sage  writing advice to "sit down and stay there," Murakami figures running has shaped his writing life: "sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story."

French philosopher Simone Weil urged that when we empty ourselves and purge the concept of "I, " we allow for the entrance of something else. Weil was speaking of God, but it could just as well be an inspiration, clarity, or thoughts that drift about and shift like cotton.

Or it could be nothing.

Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

When I Talk About Running moves by with a lovely syncopation, one measured by footsteps, tapping keystrokes, and thoughts being formed.   Robert Macfarlane's blissful book The Old Ways about the paths we make (and what they make of us) measures pace by the length of his foot, step after step, and argues for the connection between movement and cognition. It is quite human to measure and consider progression, no? But there is also meandering - Murakami picks up thoughts, plays with them for a bit, and then sets them down in pursuit of he knows not what.

It's been a while since I've run the streets of Tokyo, which in September is still sweltering. The lingering heat of the summer in the city is something else. I silently run, my whole body sweaty. I can feel even my cap steadily getting soaked. The sweat is part of my clear shadow as it drips onto the ground. The drops of sweat hit the pavement and immediately evaporate.

Accompany Murakami's superb self-witnessing with Stephen Fry's delight in the pause of poetry, Juni'ichiro Tanizaki's praise of hidden pleasures, or my study of that niggling feeling that something or someone will come at you with its busyness.

Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Murakami wrote this book when he was a Harvard Fellow, and he ran daily alongside the Charles River. I lived in Boston, too, and was also training for a marathon at the time. Chances are high that the great Japanese author and I were in the same space simultaneously. Each wondering about the other?

Or both thinking about exactly nothing in particular and enjoying the full emptiness of mind, the state of being that Erich Fromm called the state of being rather than having or striving.

No matter what, though, I keep up my running. Running every day is a kind of lifeline for me, so I'm not going to lay off or quit just because I'm busy. If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I'd never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit. All I can do is keep those few reasons nicely polished.

Murakami wrote When I Talk About Running... when he was in his late fifties, he is in his mid-seventies now. I imagine him running, perhaps a bit more slowly but in a void-delivering steady pace.