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Showing posts from June, 2014

On Un-Becoming a Runner

Over the last few months, I have become less and less a runner. None of this was an act of will or a decision. Things have conspired -- family, body, job. I know this is true because when I go for a run now there is an absence of fluidity. The identity is not natural; it's artificial. The causes of this change are not so relevant, and understanding them would bring little understanding to the fact of change itself. This is the thing about change: in the raw core of its newness its origins can't be traced. Things do come into this world out of nothing, putting the lie to the the logic of causality. The philosopher decrees:  ex nihilo fit nihil . And yet -- each morning novelty covers the grass of the world like fresh dew. Some changes, of course, run deeper than others, and we use the language of identity to talk about those deep changes. We say: I am this, as if the words am, is are, be  were incantations that take a moment in time and lock it up in a case. John Dewey, foll