You are moving. You have always been moving — from the next goal to the one after it, from achievement to achievement, from the moment you are in to the one you are already planning. It feels like drive, like ambition, like simply the way you are made. But every so often, in a still moment you did not choose, a quiet question surfaces and will not quite leave: what are you running from, that you cannot stop?
You do not remember when the running began. It has been the water you swim in for so long that stillness feels like drowning. To slow down is not restful to you; it is faintly threatening, as though something might catch you if you paused. So you keep the momentum up, and you call the momentum a life.
Motion as a hiding place
Here is what the running has been so good at hiding: that you have never asked where you are going, or why. The goals gave you a direction so total that you never had to face the deeper question of direction itself. As long as there was a next thing, you did not have to sit with the possibility that you did not know what any of it was for. Speed became a way of never arriving anywhere you would have to feel.
Not all momentum is progress. Some of it is only flight.
And the cruelty of it is that the running works. It delivers, again and again, the very achievements the world applauds, so that no one — least of all you — thinks to call it what it also is. Who questions a person who is winning? But winning and fleeing can wear the same face, and only you, in the unguarded hours, can feel the difference between them.
You do not have to stop tonight; perhaps you could not if you tried. But you might, just once, let the question stand without out-running it — not to answer it, only to feel that it is there. There is something behind you that you have spent a lifetime staying ahead of. It is not chasing you to harm you. It is only trying, patiently, to be met.
