Except its own Furtherance

Today is wonderfully warm and sunny. It is as if the weather has switched from February to June without the intervening months. As a result everybody has come out and the woods and fields are alive with people enjoying the outdoors, blinking at the unfamiliar sunlight.

I have been on the trails in the woods but instead of taking a familiar route everything was done randomly: left, right, straight ahead, all based on what the path looked like, with no idea of destination. I ended up in places I had not previously been, without a clear idea of exactly where I was. Quite by chance I came across a carpet of bluebells, a patch ahead of the rest of the woods, that created its own soft haze of violet blue.

I so desperately want this to be a metaphor for my running: I have no clear plan or any idea of where it my lead me; all I want it to occasionally discover the odd moment of peace, repose and beauty.

As for why this is important I found this is in the introduction to 'Cultural amnesia' by Clive James (there is a neat review by Nicholas Lezard here):

The usual division is to treat our daily job as the adventure and our cultural diversions as a mere mechanism for renewal and repose. But the adventurous jobs are becoming more predictable all the time, even at the level of celebrity and conspicuous material success … The real adventure is no longer in the job. In the job we can have a profile written about us , and be summed up: all profiles will be the same and all summaries add up to the same thing. The real adventure is what we do to entertain ourselves … But even the entertainment can no longer be adventurous if it serves a purpose. It will be adventurous only if it serves itself. In other words it will not be utilitarian. It has always been part of the definition of humanism that true learning has no end in view except its own furtherance.

Well that will do.