The Contemplative Run

On the ten hour drive from McAllen to Dallas, I recently had a chance to stop for a couple of hours and run in Pedernales Falls State Park. I ran the Wolf Mountain Trail to Jones Spring.

Perhaps it was the evidence of settlers long gone, remembered only by the stone walls they built and short paragraphs about them in the park service brochures, but I found myself contemplative, perhaps at times, even morose. I wondered what Plato and Socrates would think about distance running on trails. In the opening of Phaedrus, Socrates mentions that he doesn't go outside the city walls often. He prefers to be where he can have conversation.

 I, on the other hand, like to get out where I can be alone. When I run I have time and room to think. I thought about Socrates's love of conversation. Of course, it was more than simple conversation, it was dialectic. The self-knowledge Socrates had, as well as knowledge about human frailties, not only requires the raw materials, the facts, but the time and space to think about those facts. Despite what he tells Phaedrus, Socrates needed time alone, time to think. We read in other places, for instance the story by Alcibiades, of Socrates standing still all night long while on a military campaign, thinking. It seems he has chosen his method of contemplation, I have chosen mine.