The Beauty of the Ice Runner

Can dignity be contagious?

“Those who want to do good are not selfish, they are not in a hurry, they know that to impregnate people with good requires a long time. But evil has wings.”

-M. K. Gandhi

I’ve had a love affair with slowness for a while now. Maybe it was going to college in an institution that seemed to prize speed, in a part of the world — Silicon Valley — that had made its fortunes through mottos like Move Fast and Break Things. Maybe it’s also my natural inclination to move through life a little languidly, arriving a bit late to most meetings and always making sure to leave room for the next reverie. I prefer public transit and community gardens; I prefer the slowness of a Sunday morning moving from book to book like a bumblebee roves from peony to peony. I take things up and I put them down, sometimes without really accomplishing anything. It’s part of who I am.¹

I think, though, that over time I’ve also started to moralize slowness. The first time I read Wendell Berry’s poem, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” I remember being struck by these particular lines, and the connection they made between sacred work and time:

Ask the questions that have no answers.
    Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
    Say that your main crop is the forest
    that you did not plant,
    that you will not live to harvest.
    Say that the leaves are harvested
    when they have rotted into the mold.
    Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

    Put your faith in the two inches of humus
    that will build under the trees
    every thousand years.

I think Berry paints a gorgeous image of one kind of very worthy life. But it’s just one kind. I think, over time, I came to associate goodness always with slowness, as though slowness were the proof of goodness itself. If something seemed rushed, stressed or somehow not easeful, I was quick to dismiss it as energetically tainted, as though such a buzzy enterprise couldn’t possibly make the world a better place. But I think in many ways, I was confusing my own comfort with moral insight.²

I prefer to do things slowly, and many slow things are good: reparative ecology, political consensus building, even the intimate work of building a deep friendship or romantic relationship. (And, while we’re on the subject, many fast things are bad: the destruction caused by warfare, the killing of living beings, the collapse of complex and intricate ecosystems.) But is it always the case, as Gandhi says, that goodness takes time, and evil has wings?

Or are there moments when good seems to happen all at once?

—I had an odd thing happen to me this year that changed my perspective on this.

It was January in Toronto, and I was learning to run in the winter.

My habit had been to take the Don River Trail south, but on this particular day, I was headed north to an unfamiliar stretch of the trail. As it turned out, this new stretch had been beautifully paved, so beautifully paved that overnight, a long corridor of ice had formed over it like a smooth and deadly carapace.

Running on ice! It’s not for the faint of heart. In the weeks leading up this run I had run on all manner of winter terrain: on crunchy snow-dirt, which was a bit like gravel underfoot; over light dustings of powdered snow, which left pleasing footprints; even over different varieties of slush, which burst like jelly when you stepped on them and left the road a greyish slurry.

Ice, though, was a different beast: the more flawless it looked, the more dangerous I knew it to be. And before me was an uncontested stretch of it, as long as the eye could see.

A wave of anxiety hit me. Maybe I should turn back. I had begun to run over the ice, but I was unsure of myself, not just in the specific moment but in general, as in, would a more experienced runner just know not to do this? Or would they go ahead anyway? I was afraid, but I couldn’t differentiate between first-time jitters and a rational read of the situation. Eventually I decided: I’d turn back.

But just as I paused and caught my breath, I saw another runner at the end of the icy river. They were running in my direction.

This was a seasoned runner, in a sleek, all-black outfit; the sort of no-nonsense costume one wears to do something that is so thoroughly a part of their DNA, they no longer see it as extraordinary. And they weren’t just running; they seemed to advance in playful hops, their knees high and their strides short, like a prancing horse, light on their feet. I could feel, even from a distance, and against the odds, that they were having fun.

As they passed me, the runner smiled without waving, so subtly you had to be looking for it; the kind of small acknowledgement runners give one another when they are in the flow state and don’t want to wake up from the dream. I smiled back. And then I felt embarrassed.

Why was I embarrassed? It wasn’t that I sensed disdain or judgement underneath the other runner’s smile; in fact, I had the distinct impression that I had made hardly an impression on them at all. Rather, I think I felt embarrassed by the beauty of that ice runner.

This wasn’t a sexual beauty or a romantic beauty: instead, the beauty seemed to come from the almost mystical experience of this person running, the total merging of what they were doing with who they were. It was like encountering the verb phrase, “to run on ice,” in its purest form; you had the sense that whoever this person was, their identity, name, preferences for different foods, memories, traditions, none of these things mattered. All that mattered was the running, and inside it, they had simply dissolved.

There was something else, too: something about the fact that they were running on the exact same trail, at the exact same time as me — this wasn’t just a video of some gorgeous Olympian, some flawless marathoner streaming through like a stallion in 1080p, this was a humble Torontonian, so close I heard their breath and footfalls, the photons bouncing directly off them and into my hapless eyes. We were of the same world.

Well if they can do it, I certainly can! I thought to myself. And I finished my run.

Since that day I’ve tried to piece together what happened in that moment. Because it seemed that against my own belief in Gandhian slowness, I had been changed in an instant — and in a way that I felt was ultimately good, at least for me. Said differently, I felt that the dignity of this unknown runner had suddenly become contagious.

Being a teacher is one of my day jobs. And as a teacher, there’s a easy interpolation of the Gandhian quote above, and it’s this: building character, getting students to act well and act morally, to want the right things, necessarily takes time. It’s not possible to just infect someone, suddenly, with a desire to grow… right?

But what if there is? What if, in certain moments and certain ways, good is suddenly exactly what the student wants to do?³ That’s certainly what I think the ice runner did for me. And if I were to break down the moment, I’d say there were at least two different elements that made it possible:

1. Beauty - I was moved in my senses by this runner. I wasn’t just intellectually told that finishing my run was good. I was wooed. I was simply moved to want to be them, from a place of dazzlement and untarnished admiration. It was visceral!

2. Accessibility - Though I was moved, it also wasn’t by a celebrity or some magazine story of an ultramarathoner. It was right in front of me, so accessible that we were literally doing the same thing. It seemed eminently possible, perhaps even undeniable, that I could.

The presence of one but not both of these is not enough. After all, anyone can read the biographies of the heroes in their field, but these beautiful tales of ingenuity and circumstance rarely inspire action the next morning. Or even in our personal lives: we each have friends who have gone on to live apparently high-flying, amazing lives, but the stories of their dinner-party-filled million-dollar apartments with exquisite spouses don’t instill inspiration. More likely than not, we feel ourselves careening between envy and indifference.

On the other hand, we’ve also experienced accessibility without beauty: check lists and to-do lists of things that are trivial to do, but ultimately leave us dead inside. Often we find ourselves putting these things aside not because we can’t do them, but because something in us chafes against doing them, against their essential ugliness perhaps — ugliness in the sense that we find them purposeless or silly in the light of the moral weight of our very finite lives.

The final thing I’ll say is this: if one is even remotely leftist, or concerned about social justice these days, it’s incredibly easy to find examples of the ways our world has failed to deliver justice. Oftentimes we like to blame the nearest speedy things: the twisted hyperreality created by the Internet, social media, the advertising industry… we point to these accelerated evils as a way of saying, “Look at the Goliath we are up against!” And too, we imagine ourselves as the slow, thoughtful counterpoints to this Goliath. We turn to community gardens. The slow mending of the social fabric through volunteering, political activism, deep canvassing…

And I love these slow solutions as much as the next person!

But I also think that this picture is over-simplified. For example, if evil is always faster than good, how do we explain that despite the fact that humans have been around for 6 million years, things are only this messed up? Stay with me here: I know things are fucked up. But if evil always beats good in a race, don’t you think things would be way more messed up than they are?

I do. I’m not sure that’s persuasive to anyone else but me, but I’ll say this.

I don’t think good is always slow. I think sometimes, in a mystical way, we are touched by the goodness around us almost instantly. I think of Dante seeing Beatrice on a sunny day in Rome and that vision, that beatific vision, guiding his extraordinary literary work for literally the rest of his life. I think of small acts of kindness that somehow, inexplicably, reshape someone’s entire character. And I think of this word that Christians have called “grace,” which, regardless of your faith, is a way to talk about an instant act that changes everything completely.

And this kind of instant good, this flash of brilliance, usually is the result of the slow-hard work under the surface, no doubt. Like mushrooms building a bed of mycelia for years before appearing, seemingly overnight, in a wet field — we may have to do good slowly, then all at once. But even if that’s the case, we don’t have to resign ourselves to imagining our work as slow. We can open ourselves to the inexplicable and recognize that sometimes, the smallest things we do, as a result of our commitment to the work itself, send off strange sparks that seem incommensurate to the work and time we put into them. As though they have a life of their own, their own sense of virality, contagiousness, quickening spirit.

And isn’t that just way more fun?
And doesn’t that just make it all the more worthwhile?
To think that any one thing you do — at any time — can change things in an enormous way?

I have one last idea about the ice runner, a hypothesis about a third element. And that element, though it’s tied to beauty, though it’s tied to accessibility, is also different: it’s attention.

I was recently on a phone call with an old friend, and they mentioned that they had been reading the Christian mystic Simone Weil. This is the writer who believed so deeply in a kind of divine passivity that she felt — if I’m summarizing this correctly — that our ability to pay attention is the foundation for our connection to God. Not our ability to pray, or to do good acts, or anything that requires active human will; no, Weil believed that we had to surrender and allow God’s will to act through us, and God could only enter us if we were, you know, actually there. Paying attention.

I’m not Christian, but I believe deeply in the power of being actually there. Of really being on the ice, and enjoying it; of really being aware and awake as much as I can when I’m on the bus, or at the grocery store, or going for a walk. It sounds simple but it’s absolutely wickedly difficult. Sometimes it feels like torture, and it’s why we’ve arguably dedicated the vast majority of our innovation brainpower to creating more and more sophisticated diversions for ourselves. Most of us, myself included, would rather be somewhere else than where we are right now, feeling whatever our bodies are feeling, doing whatever we’re doing, and just being absorbed into it. Most of us need to go away for a while.

And I’m not blaming us for this — heaven knows it’s difficult enough for me, someone without chronic pain and/or other recurring challenges, to stay aware of my own existence without losing my damn mind. But what I am saying is this: when I pull off being really, really into what I’m doing, and just paying full attention, I kind of feel like the ice runner. I feel like I’m tapping into a beauty not my own, and like my presence may have a strange power to it, though I can’t claim it or say for sure that it’s there. If I think too hard about it, it goes away; if it exists, it’s probably strongest when I’m totally unaware.

But if it exists, it also means there may be another way to do good in this world.

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1. I should also note that it’s an artifact of enormous privilege to be able to live a life of slowness. Movements like Slow Food are undeniably markers of class, and my own ability to show up late to work meetings is one kind of proof of the (very white-collar) job that I have.

2. What’s more, I think even Gandhi would make a distinction between slowness over time, as in “it takes decades to build a healthy, trusting, functional community” and actual slowness in-the-moment, as in “it’s taking me 15 minutes to tie my shoes.” To be fair to the Mahatma, he seemed to be mostly talking about the former.

3. And I say “student” very broadly here, as I know not everyone who reads this is in education. I think we need a teaching-learning relationship in many aspects of life, and thinking of our work more often as teaching would probably be helpful for most. But that’s for another time and another essay.