Scattered

That's how I feel, scattered. My attention is fragmented. I hop like a flea. Internet! Kindle! A sandwich! CNN! Camera phone! Cats! The LA Times! Clutter busting! MLB channel! Dog! 

It's taken me a while, since Monday actually, to recognize that my frenetic behavior signifies that I am dipping in and out of thinking about the bombs on that day in Boston and just can't do any more than dip. I want to know the details, except I really don't want to know the details. Lurid newspaper photos of a fertilizer plant explosion in Texas merge in my mind with images of a bloodied Copley Square. The look of my grandson's perfect little body and the sound of his joyous, innocent laugh are mixed in there too, as are snapshots of shattered limbs. 

Life is a hard business. We are all in it together; even the perpetrators of evil acts (Boston) or careless acts (Texas) are our siblings, bound to us in this human family by the universal cycle of birth, life, and death.

I think I'm fragmented because I have no clear thoughts about any of this. Heartfelt expressions of outrage and articulations of compassion come into my head, but I reject them as hackneyed. I don't know how to talk about large subjects in any vernacular other than the cliched. Pain: bad. Well-being: good.

I ran Tuesday morning and I wish I could say it was cleansing. In fact, it was just dark, and I felt sluggish. Yes, I cherish my membership in what feels like a community of runners who all have some special knowledge that we share. Even as I start feeling smug about our uniqueness, I realize our knowledge is just one version of what every human being intuitively knows. As I struggle to describe this knowledge, it hits me: it's that there is no problem so big, no tragedy so great, no knot so Gordian that dealing with it can't be eased (if only infinitisemally) by moving our bodies for a reasonable--or unreasonable--amount of time. This palliative is cheaper than drugs, and widely available.

As luck would have it, I've got some IT issue flaring up today, so running hasn't seemed like a great option. But I shut off the computer, the TV, the Kindle, and the phone and went for a 30-minute walk. The fruit of my excursion is this post. It's nothing profound, but I'll take it because it is the closest thing to clarity I've been able to achieve using this pogo stick I call my mind.