The rat race, the busy bandwagon – call it what you may. It exerts a magnetic pull on our mood, our action and our behaviours. We compulsively check our phones for the next email, we ruminate over work politics and hype ourselves into a state of chronic hysteria – which manifests itself in all facets of life, not least on our commute.
Running for trains is the default for working adults in big cities – their faces straining, lungs heaving and shirts soaked with BO-infused sweat. And for what? To make a tube/metro, that in all likelihood comes every three minutes, for a job they cant wait to leave when the clock strikes 5.
I was one of these compulsive runners – feeling a constant need to max out on my time and never be late. Even if this meant morphing into a hot sticky mess.
That was until I heard the story of a veteran stoic martial artist – maintaining a serene disposition as his fellow athletes sprinted for a train. “Never run in public”, he bellowed – to his company’s bewilderment.
“Never run in public.”
Upon hearing this story it felt like a throwback to the days of Zeno or Marcus Aurelius. Yet it felt philosophical without the fluff. To the point and concise. It echoed the stoic books I had read previous but had never been able to incorporate. It reminded me of Nassim Taleb:
“Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you’re seeking.” “Never run in public” trimmed the fat off Nassim’s words and forced me to put them into action.
Not running for a train is a tiny but significant step in reclaiming your time and space in the rat race. It’s no conspiracy that the rat race considers you entirely expendable. It’s an ugly race to the bottom based on who can depreciate their worth as a human the most. It makes us robotic and machine like, beholden to the orders of bosses and “the firm.”
By refusing to surrender to the pull of the rat race you in a sense, realise your worth. As taleb puts it – “you stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by force.”
By not running – you accept that you have already f*cked up your timings and accept the natural course of things. To mention a stoic concept we covered in a previous post – you love your fate (amor fati).
I recall forcing myself to not run for a train for the first time – feeling an unusual sense of serenity envelop my body as my fellow commuters huffed and puffed. I was at ease, focusing on my internal priorities rather than those of others or of my environment.
As Epictetus puts it in discourses – “If a person shifts their caution to their own reasoned choices and the acts of those choices, they will at the same time gain the will to avoid, but if they shift their caution away from their own reasoned choices to things not under their control, seeking to avoid what is controlled by others, they will then be agitated, fearful and unstable.”
Running is for the treadmill. Never run in public.
