“I broke the speed of foxes and rabbits and kept going. I entered the speed of sound and broke it like it was a cheap toy. When I was flying across the picnic fields and could see the windmill and could smell the salty ocean, I became light itself.”
— Johannes, The Eyes and the Impossible
When social media became a thing that could make people rich, I was positioned nicely to do so. And I didn’t do it. I didn’t think it would pain me, but I knew it would dim the light.
I’d love to be rich and important one day, and I know I’m smart enough and hardworking enough to do so, but I don’t want it to come in sound bites, curated scenes, or while wearing $100 yoga pants. If it happens, I want to make my mark helping people, sweating with effort: with my sleeves rolled up and my forearms deep in the muck and mire of the human condition.
It’s a scary thing to admit, but I want to write a book. I want to tell my story the way I like to learn other people’s stories. I want to relate to people deeply: word by word, sentence mounting on sentence, pages turning, chapters finished and resting on a nightstand, patient.
Social media is noise. I want a slow, driving symphony — with space for interludes that feel like tangents, cacophonies, and the general messiness that makes art feel alive.
I have a friend who is completely unflappable, except when it is windy. Wind brings her to the brink of madness. It makes her loony, crazed, like smeared mascara — it brings the true bull goose of her being to life.
Now me, on the other hand, I’m a highly flappable human. My bull goose is never hidden in the shadows. But, for some reason, I am oblivious to wind. It’s true. Once, in Italy, I biked over forty kilometers straight into a headwind without noticing. It was only when my partner shouted from behind, “Thanks so much for breaking the wind,” that I realized I’d been fighting one of nature’s strongest forces for the last two hours. And when I realized that, I was pissed. If she hadn’t said anything, I would have kept pedaling in miserably beautiful bliss, none the wiser.
Maybe it’s my high pain tolerance, or my oblivion to howling gusts, but I have a lot of good memories from my decade as a professional runner, when I was asked to tune into the noise of social media.
I once stumbled across a quote on Twitter that I’ve thought about nearly every day since. It’s helped my mental health and general disposition more than almost any other skill set I’ve acquired:
If you feel like you hate everyone, eat something.
If you feel like everyone hates you, go to sleep.
If you feel like you hate yourself, take a shower.
If you feel like everyone hates everyone, go outside.
There was a time I interacted with my own Twitter followers — something I rarely did. My son was two, and at the time I was reading three books to him every night in bed. And I was bored to tears.
There’s a recent trend in kids’ books, and it is this: they all suck. No, I’m serious. They all want to teach some solemn lesson about kindness or whatever. And I love kindness and all that, but when you have a two-year-old, a single day lasts four centuries. I didn’t want to learn a lesson at the end of the day. I wanted to lay my head on a pillow and be entertained.
So I asked my Twitter followers to tell me their all-time favorite children’s books — the ones they loved reading to their kids at night. That tweet opened our bedtime world to Strega Nona, Ferdinand, and all of Jan Brett. Bedtime went from mind-numbing Sunday School lessons to magical pasta pots, bulls who sniffed flowers, and huskies stranded on icebergs.
This year my son turned five, and the magic of our old books started to grow stale. In truth, my arms were tired. I didn’t want to hold up a picture book while lying in bed anymore.
I decided we needed to read a real book — a chapter book. One I could hold close to my face without my wings splayed open and aching. One we could savor slowly, night by night, without renegotiating our choice every evening.
My son was skeptical. “No pictures? But what will I look at?”
“You’ll look at your imagination,” I said.
“The backs of your fucking eyelids,” I didn’t say.
I expected the idea to flop, so I didn’t waste time picking and choosing. I went to the library and grabbed a book: The Eyes and the Impossible by Dave Eggers.
The cover had a dog (a minus, because my son likes cats) and a Newbery Medal (a plus, because he loves gold). I didn’t read the jacket. The only reason I opened the book was to make sure the font wasn’t too small or too crowded. My eyes, like my arms, are getting tired these days.
That night, I didn’t expect it to go well. I expected my son to be bored. I expected me to be bored. I didn’t care. I just wanted some forearm relief.
I had no idea when we started that the main character — a dog named Johannes — would turn out to be a fanatical runner.
I had no idea that a dog in a children’s book could use words like “paragon,” “precariously,” and “relatively improvisational.” And I would have never expected that my son would understand them. (The only word he stopped me to ask about was “metallic.”)
I’ve read almost every book there is to read about running. And, with the exception of Des Linden describing what it felt like to race the Boston Marathon, this dog named Johannes has done the best job of putting into words what it feels like to run — in your body, in your spirit, and in the interplay between yourself and the natural world. If it were up to me, Johannes would be the commentator of every major marathon and track meet.
You won’t find The Eyes and the Impossible on a social media post titled “Best Books to Read to Your Five-Year-Old.” Which is a big reason I loved it. The other reason is that I couldn’t believe a fictional dog could make me remember what it felt like when I was young — what it felt like in my body for those fifteen years when I was a runner, period, and that was all that mattered.
My son doesn’t really like running, and he doesn’t believe me when I tell him I used to be a really good runner. He doesn’t know this book isn’t meant for five-year-olds. I can’t tell you exactly why he loved it, only that he did. He absolutely loved it.
I can tell you his favorite part was when Angus the raccoon bit a park employee on the ankle. I can tell you that we now say to each other, “You’re nothing but a dirty ankle biter,” which I think means, in one way or another, “I love you.”
I can tell you that Cima brushed his teeth every night for two weeks, without complaint, because I promised I’d read that night’s chapter — word by word, sentence compounding on sentence — as soon as he finished. He’d put his toothbrush down and race into bed.
I’d put my phone downstairs on the charger, asleep for the night, and race after him.
And when I finished the chapter, he’d beg for me to continue. “Just one more chapter…”
Most nights I agreed — not because he is the thing that matters most to me in the world, period — but because I wanted to.
“I took the earth under me and sent it into the past…”
— Johannes
Leave a Reply