Coping with my cowardice

Conscience doth make cowards of us all. I think what Shakespeare meant by ‘conscience’ was what we might call self-consciousness. That has certainly been making a coward of me.

A couple of years ago I turned again to a form of exercise I’d rather abandoned for a long time. That’s running. I never liked it, though I had to admit that it did seem to do me good. And, with my weight rising and my sleep less peaceful than it once was, I felt it was time to take it up again. After all, these days I listen to audiobooks while out walking, so why not listen to them while running, and turn some effective if painful exercise into a rather more pleasant experience?

The problem was that I felt somewhat embarrassed. I knew I was slow. Clumsy even. Certainly overweight. I really didn’t want anyone to see me out running with all that against me.

Now, I’ve read Sartre. You sacrifice your very liberty if you see yourself through the eyes of others. The trick was to rise above all that and say to myself “who cares? It shouldn’t matter to me whether anyone else thinks I’m silly. What matters is what I think of myself.”

The trouble was that I rather thought of myself as silly.

Thus conscience did make a coward of me.

The answer was to do my running indoors. I don’t mean on a treadmill. No, I literally mean running around the house. Up and downstairs from time to time to make it a little more challenging. But at least the floor was flat, there were no stones to negotiate, and above all nobody could see me.

Well, not nobody. Not eventually. Inevitably the time would come when family would find me panting around the house and say, “what the heck are you doing?”, often with a rather more emphatic word relacing ‘heck’. 

And you know what? That really opened my eyes. It suddenly came to me that while I was worried about looking silly while running outside, nothing was more silly than running indoors. I mean, dodging furniture when you could be breathing the fresh air of our woods? Enjoying the sights of the stately pines? Running along sandy paths?

It finally dawned on me that I was being silly. I needed to start enjoying those things. I needed to get out of doors to do my running.

So I’ve started outside running again, at last. And would you believe it? It really is much pleasanter.

I like our sitting room (left)
But a woodland path is far better for a run

What’s more, far from looking at me as though I were silly, people have been friendly to me out there. It’s a bit like the way other parents, complete strangers, will strike up conversations with you at a school gate if you have kids with you as they do. Or indeed other dog walkers will smile and chat if their path crosses yours while you’re out with a dog or two of your own.

So I was delighted that two joggers I passed in the woods, on two separate occasions, made a point of smiling and raising a hand in greeting at me as I struggled on.

That was truly gratifying. A real pleasure. Of course, I can’t help feeling that part of their message is “I know what you’re suffering, because I’m suffering it too. But doesn’t it feel better knowing that you’re not the only victim of such self-inflicted pain? Just keep going. You’ll be able to stop soon.”

Certainly, that made me feel much better. Far from being ridiculed, I was being offered human solidarity. Some fellow feeling and kindness.  

It actually makes the whole ghastly experience much less ugly. It makes me feel less of a coward. And Sartre was right, it makes me feel much freer.

Though, of course, that may be because there’s a lot more space in the woods than in my sitting room.