Post Swansea post
Well, Charlie, Debz and I all ran the Swansea Admiral 10k on 28th September - loud cheers all round! It was a lovely day, warm and bright, unlike me who, having recovered from a rather painful hip bursitis the previous week, felt distinctly slow and unfit! The other two were stars though, running in their first race (I sound like an old lag - my fourth!) and providing endless encouragement and cheer as well as a variety of strange foodstuffs to sustain me. We decided we’d try to organise an annual fundraising run for the bursary fund here and encourage anyone who’s ever thought of taking part in a race to join us - watch this space for next year’s event!
Yesterday I found in a notebook something I wrote some time ago when I was reading "Enlightenment Unfolds. The Essential Teachings of Zen Master Dogen". Dogen’s great koan was something like "If we already possess Buddha-nature then why is practice necessary?" His answer to this was "Practice is Enlightenment". The notes I’d made were "… maybe this is like thinking that climbing to the top of a big hill would be a good way of getting fit. The top of the hill can be seen as the goal, but it’s only setting our foot on the path that allows enlightenment to unfold. If we keep longing for the pinnacle, we don’t notice that our body is getting stronger and fitter all the time, with every step. We don’t actually want the top of the hill - what we want is how we will be when we finally get there". Time to get the shoes back on.
