Beads of sweat form on my forehead. Atharvashirsha, the Sanskrit chant for Ganpati – the God of art and science – echoes through the room at my in-laws in a village near Goa. This is the fifth iteration. Six more to go. I pick up milk in a small ladle and bathe the one inch metal statue in front of me. I am standing & unlike previous few years, I am standing comfortably. Earlier everything used to hurt. Now, this is nothing. I am a soon-to-be marathoner, I eat standing for breakfast, I tell myself. The ego inflates, I feel good.
Then something interesting happens. A familiar sensation of doing one lap one after the other sets in. Six more to go, I tell myself. Why is this so familiar ?
It’s just like a Sunday long run! Nah. It’s not that hard, nowhere close. This is more of a base run. Funny how you measure effort in terms of running as you develop the running habit.
I have been doing these rituals for two days every year, for few years now. Having practically no interest in the seemingly obsolete act of worship itself, and only having to go there because I am a male who is young enough, and close enough to sustain the standing around and performance of the ritual – another patriarchal tradition I have come to despise when so many strong and interested women – including my own wife can do twice the job at it than I ever can, and has exponentially more intent to do it well that I can imagine. But it is what it is, and I am no revolutionary. So, I get down from my high horse of feminism and take off the armour of common sense, and I do this every year for two days. It makes my wife happy, it makes her folks happy, and I get to eat a lot of amazing food during the festivities. There is some strange comfort in traditions that is apparent in this family’s eyes, although I am yet to find it within myself. This time however, I am busy drawing a parallel between my running and this ritual as it progresses.
What if the essence of this whole farce once upon a time ago was this attempt at self awareness? To put oneself through rigorous effort with clean body and mind – not unlike putting on your running clothes and stretching before you get the run in. It’s amazing how some of our rituals include breathing exercises as a form of cleansing and inviting the divine in. In all my hate for these loosely interpreted forms of worships, and socially stagnant waters of compulsive methods, maybe this is what it was about until we human beings corrupted it with the rest of the bloat, very much like runners getting into PRs and expensive shoes and fancy apparel. Not very different from running after all.
Maybe this is the reconciliation that we Indians, especially Hindus crave deep down. There is centuries of war between cultures and then there is the sudden leap into westernisation – more recently Americanisation. Religion cast aside as a bystander as the wheels of progress turns us more and more into the consumers we are today. In between these two ways of life, there is nothing. So some of us, including so called progressive ones like myself believe in shunning all past and only making sense of what we feel and know today, feeling a void called upon by our genes, and there are people who are in this village, rejecting everything new almost vehemently for these few days, later checking their Instagram feeds for any western influence they can gobble up. Somehow we seem to think these two cannot be reconciled.
Perhaps we just need to figure out ways to foray into these valleys and attempt to draw parallels. Whether it is everyday runners like myself looking at metaphysical aspects, or genius quantum physicists looking into concepts of multiverse through Vishnu Puran, i think we ought to make a better effort at this. Perhaps, as the one of oldest civilisations, it is time that we admitted what our ancestors did long ago- that we don’t know everything. That modern life requires modern rituals, or at least the reassessment of the old ones. Don’t get me wrong, not reinvention, just reassessment to understand them better. So our hyper-rational modern brains understand them as well as we understand running now from a scientific standpoint.
In more ways than one, running is one of the most spiritual experiences one’s sprits passes through. I guess that’s true for most athletic activities but feel that it’s truest for running. The inner monologue that occurs during hours and hours of running is not for those who are scared of bit of self-awareness. It resembles these old and now misrepresented rituals. When the miles pile up, the layers of oneself – both physical and mental – begin to peel off. While the city tries to break your spirit by the traffic jams and the potholes and the long commutes, you cannot help but draw the parallel to the long distance run you have done a day before. This is where one begins to understand why monks, sanyasis sit for hours and hours surrounded by no bodily comfort, where one wonders if the solitude that we runners seek is not very different than the one sought within oneself during prolong worship. Humans perhaps, have to be stripped down physically to a state of fatigue before our spiritual journeys begin. I tell this to myself that this will be transcending as the distance runs get longer, the tempo runs get harder and every other run becomes more unbearable sandwiched between those two. Really it’s not the mileage that hits you hard, nor the fatigue. It’s the evolution that hits home, and hits hard. One begins to learn saying no. No to things that one enjoyed so much before. Bye bye Netflix. Maybe later, alcohol. So long deserts. You become a brahmin maybe? Connecting with the essence of yourself – the brahma, the universe, the buddha, or whatever name you want to give it in a given century.
You tell yourself that you are doing all this to become a better runner, but deep down you know it’s more. The change unsettles you out so much that you begin to question if there is another personality trying to break out from within the rest of you. In fact, the whole idea of “you” that you had for so long and held on to so dearly undergoes a sort of deconstruction. Your thirst for validation dissipates. You measure things not in what was achieved, but what was endured. Sure, the competitive element to all athletic activities exists in endurance running too, no one wants to just run and feel great about it, just like no one wants to worship without purpose. Like everything else the ego is the initiator – the spark plug of our engines of self improvement. But when the vehicle really starts and gets in a few miles, it’s no longer about the start. Like any vehicle, the human spirits always wants to get somewhere, that’s its nature. The purpose of any action is in essence a nod to existence itself, isn’t it? But during that action, something else occurs. As the action – no matter how intense – becomes persistent, the action itself fades and what starts surfacing is the realisation. We are not the action, nor the actor. We are not the runners, nor the miles, neither are we the marathons that we aspire to. The ladle, the statue, the milk and this hand all devoid of meaning, illusions and stories I have told myself about all of this. These feet are not me. From nothing I came into being and into nothing I shall dissolve. The spirit is me, this tangible yet not tangible essence that controls this feet and is outside at the same time – and this body – that it will one day be too weak and old to run, but will still run, because this spirit is the motion that occurs – nay not even the motion – this spirit is what hides under the surface of repetitive motion. Whether the repetitive motion is that of running or that of rituals.
I feel the ladle come to a halt. Then I remember that I am not running, that I am standing still and the Atharvashirsha’s eleventh iteration is already complete.