Today is the first day of...

... the rest of my life. That's what we said back in the 60s. Or was it the 70s? No matter. I found myself thinking it last Thursday, which, not coincidentally, was both my birthday and the first day of my retirement. Meaning, I suppose, that things will be different for me from here on. Because I'm not yet sure different in what way, a couple of days after Thursday I found myself experiencing what I could call an existential dilemma. (I might call it that, but won't, seeing as the description seems a bit melodramatic.) I found myself thinking about the upcoming time that I'll have for identifying what is meaningful for me to do--and then for doing it. My next thought was, what if I find that nothing is really meaningful? What if the silly sayings are right? You know them:

• You're born, you shop, you die.
• Life's a beach and then you die.
• Life's a bitch and then you die.

Notice the last word in all of these cliches? Hmmm. Not very inspiring.

You may be able to see where this is going. To running, of course! The whole notion of meaningfulness falls away once I get out there. Two things I decided on this morning's run: First, I will continue to run as much as I can. (Maybe it should be you're born, you run, you die? Could be worse.) Second, I will return to writing for 15 minutes a day, which I started doing a couple of weeks ago but then fell off when life got busy.

Here's what the trail looks like on the other side of the magic curtain. It's not a yellow brick road, but darned close.

So this is the 15 minutes of writing. The running for the day was 12.5 miles this morning. I ran through what I call the magic curtain--you enter the BART station in Pleasanton, walk across the road, and presto, you're in Dublin! It is magic, especially when you can pretty much do it via the Iron Horse Trail, which I did. I ran a couple of miles into Dublin just because I could, then turned around and headed for home.

One lovely thing about the IHT: You see many, many folks enjoying it. We really were all born to move, you know.

A couple of things--first, on this run I had as my companion for some of the way a pain in my right instep. It came and went, but I kept on going forward. At this point in my life and in my running, it is pretty much always something. If it gets worse I'll deal with it. Second, I fell in jogging along for a mile or two with a guy named Wayne, who turned out to be very involved in the Huffers and Puffers running group that holds weekly events in Pleasanton. I'm tempted to do a few!

Perhaps my favorite sighting on the IHT today: A time line scrawled on the pavement. It began with "Born" and progressed through "Grammar School," "High School," and "College." Then came the above, the so-called final stage, "30!! Take Over World & Beyond!!" Undoubtedly written by someone not interested in existential dilemmas.

That's it. Tomorrow is Labor Day. My wish for you is that your labors be light and your runs be magical. And that your existential dilemmas cause you to smile rather than cry!