James Geary

Running long distances both depletes and invigorates. The farther you go, the harder the air pumps out of your lungs, the more inspiring the run becomes. Running in winter is especially nice. Dry leaves rattle around your feet like hordes of swarming insects. Your breath chugs out in big steamy gusts. Sweat seeps through shirt and fleece to freeze on your shoulders into a light dandruff of frost. Long distances cannot be covered all at once, of course. Big things are accomplished by accomplishing little things first. You start with completing a small circuit, widen the horizon a bit, then ratchet up endurance in gently excruciating bursts. Rehearse the minor hurts enough and the major ones don’t hurt. “Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out if they’ve got a second,” psychologist William James observed. It is the second wind that exhilarates as it exhausts, that blows farthest from home and closest to the goal.

Contrary to popular belief, time bears no resemblance to money whatsoever. People say time is money, but it’s not. You can’t earn time or save it. You can’t beg, borrow or steal it. It cannot be given or received. You can only spend time—invest it, wisely or unwisely—but it never pays you back in kind. That’s why time is always in such short supply, even though demand is always so high. And that’s why money is such poor compensation for all the time we lose in making it. Like wealth, time can be wasted, dissipated, frittered away. But while fortunes can be rebuilt in a day, no amount of diligence, savvy or hard work can ever restore even a moment of lost time. Nor does its value ever fluctuate; nothing is more commonplace—everyone has time—yet nothing is more precious. "Time isn’t measured by length but by depth," German poet Isolde Kurz wrote. And time doesn’t tarry long on the surface; its richest deposits are found only in the deepest pockets.

It is a paradox, really. Money is both intimate and abstract. Virtually alone among physical objects, it is freely given to and accepted from strangers. It is the substrate of our daily lives, but increasingly takes no corporal form. When at rest, it is an inert solid. It can lie fallow for centuries, guarding its awesome potential for growth. When properly stimulated, it makes more of itself, like mould growing on a stale loaf of bread. Money is like muck, English author and politician Francis Bacon said, not good except when it is spread around. Once in motion, it becomes a liquid, the world’s most powerful solvent. Everywhere money is a popular spectator sport; in banks, people watch it accumulate with interest. Like energy, it can neither be created nor destroyed, achieving its maximum force only when spent. We suspect that somewhere there must be more of it than we can see, like dark matter, since our world would fly apart without it. It is cold and hard yet also the perfect material with which to feather a nest or cushion a blow. Too often, though, we have no idea where it goes.

When stealing second base in baseball, make your upper body evaporate while your lower limbs transform into twin javelins. Commit yourself totally to this risk and then run as fast as you can, straight ahead. Don’t look back. Launch yourself into space just as you near the base; the final leg of this journey is a leap of faith. Lean back, hug the Earth, hit the dirt like a flat stone skimming the surface of a lake. Slide to one side of the bag and hook it with your foot as you pass. Perplexing your opponent is never a mistake. As you fall, throw your arms into the air—time to surrender and say one last prayer. You’ve had your chance and taken it. You’ve left everything behind to find the next safe place, however precarious. The outcome is out of your hands. Nothing gives life more zest than running for your life, science fiction author Robert Heinlein quipped. Just so, the act of stealing second base makes it wholly your own. No one asks you to give it back. Stand up, brush off the dirt, and look around. You’re already halfway home.

Waiting. It happens so often, so imperceptibly, and in the strangest locations—at elevators and intersections, by bedsides and telephones, in dentists’ offices and train stations. Stop whatever you are doing, even for an instant, and waiting instantly takes its place. It leaks in, like water, to fill up every available space. But waiting is not a passive state. Is a seed waiting before it germinates? Is a bird waiting as it incubates its eggs? These little intervals—between one breath and the next, between a missed opportunity and a second chance—are hard work, periods of intense activity, frantic preparation. He also serves who only stands and waits, John Milton wrote in Paradise Lost. What we do while doing nothing cannot be done in haste.

Why are we always beginning everything all over again? Millions of people already play the violin much better than I do. Millions have already mastered French and Spanish. Millions more already know all there is to know about wine tasting and baseball card collecting. Following in other people’s footsteps is fine, as long as I’m big enough to fill their shoes. But why start from scratch if all I can ever hope to do is scratch the surface? Because our mistakes make us interesting. Like DNA recombination—each iteration introduces slight inaccuracies, which in turn produce the astounding variation we experience as originality. Let no one say that I have said nothing new, Blaise Pascal averred. The arrangement of the material is new. When playing tennis, both players hit the same ball, but one of them places it better. In the margin for error lies all our room for maneuver.

The best things in life are free, or so we are told. Well, I don’t know about that. What I do know is, the best things in life are brief. Pleasure has an extremely short half-life. If something marvellous goes on for too long, we start to feel bored and uncomfortable. When a rainbow has lasted as long as a quarter of an hour we stop looking at it, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote. Rainbows are marvellous things but their fame, like our own, lasts just about 15 minutes. That’s no bad thing, I think. Our most intense sensations—whether sensual, intellectual, or spiritual—are always fleeting. In fact, they are all the more intense for being so short. It’s like being in an earthquake. The earth moves for only a few seconds, but the experience leaves you permanently rattled.

I saw a billboard the other day with a big picture of Thierry Henry, the French football star, on it. He loomed over the street, arms crossed—cool, aloof, determined. Next to his face were the words: “I hate to lose but I’m not afraid to fail.” I didn’t notice what Henry was advertising, probably sneakers or mobile phones or credit cards or something. Yes, success comes from welcoming your failures—and your failings. Winners are no better or worse than anybody else, just a lot more persistent. Indeed, it’s often defeat that provides the energy for perseverance. Josh Billings, a 19th–century American humorist, was getting at something like this when he wrote: Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there. And there’s another way we’re like postage stamps: We only know our real worth after we’ve been licked.