At work, last week, someone asked me how long a sentence was. Unsurprisingly, it’s not the first time I’ve been asked this, and it’s one of those questions that lends itself to a variety of responses according to the moment. The answer, of course, is that a sentence is as long as you make it. A single word or several thousand. And in this instance the answer was met not with frustration and rolled eyes, as it can be (so too the question, for that matter) but with a spark of interest as to how you might write a sentence that forms an entire essay, which led me to find this website and - even better - to this wonderful example, which in turn led me to write the post below, which came to life in as long as it took me to type it, as easily as a breath. So here it is. Breathe.
Once you begin to run, hopefully, you’ll stop thinking about all that white noise of stuff that’s not that bad inthegrandschemeofthings, but you can’t quite handle all the same, and it makes you feel - often - that you’re tilting, white-knuckled, on the edge of some opaque precipice, and even though you have no idea what would happen if you let yourself fall into that siren-calling darkness, part of you wants to just let go, because if you don’t then all that’s at your back are more ordinary problems - like the roof leaking, or that pile of essays to trudge through, or your own unspectacular addictions - and you wonder if falling for a while (and finally, because it feels like it’s always been coming), you wonder if this isn’t exactly what you need to shake you out of the mediocrity you wear like a damp blanket, better than nothing, no doubt, and far better than most, but no less miserable all the same, so you try to run it off, and it works, mostly, because the sound of your breathing becomes your whole universe, and every footfall, placed with calculated recklessness, becomes symbolic of something … you’re not sure what, but something … and the key is really to not think about it too much but just to spend some time suspended in that animation as if you could press pause on the moments where both your feet have left the ground and you hang there weightless and free of all the shit, held in this invisible, intricate web of breathing and sweat and wind in your face, and the certainty of stone, earth, rain, trees, and all those things that need and expect nothing from you, but this.