I’m not trying to affect that paranoid style that seems so popular in America today. And I’m not trying to strive for a perfection created by the marketeers and manipulators. I’m just out here chasing my bliss. Hugging trees. Running trails. Riding bikes. Hiking up steep goddamned pitches, and sometimes skiing back down. I just turned 49, and it makes me want to set things on fire, including myself.

Time, though a deeply flawed construct of our practical minds, keeps ticking away, and that has real ramifications for the amount of ass I’ll be able to kick before I’m a ghost haunting the last Orange Julius in the last functioning mall in America.

I’m making good progress.

It started with a really unexpected run, 8-and-a-half miles at reasonable speed, in total comfort, finished easily. I found myself back at the car not quite believing what had happened. I rechecked my watch. I scanned my body for undetected fatigue or injury.

Fascinating.

And then that run became another and another in much the same fashion. I have been fit before, but I have never felt this odd, disembodied comfort, almost as if I’m riding along in someone else’s very excellent body. I began, very quietly, to congratulate myself for working hard enough to arrive at this magical place. Wasn’t this, after all, what I was looking for all along?

And that’s when I realized my mistake. I had snuck up on myself, thrown a bag over my own head, and shoved my body into the trunk of a Cadillac called complacency. It was roomy, and warm, and despite the bag on my head and the bumping around, I liked it. I could have stayed indefinitely, but where exactly was I?

Where exactly was I? And where was I headed?

This comfort, I saw, was the enemy of the comfort I was seeking, a blissful place beyond the next rise, beyond suffering, beyond caring what was still to come, the comfort of total acceptance and total willingness. I can get there, as long as I don’t stop moving, and if someone gets me out of the trunk of this big, beautiful car.