He ran his won race
Not around other men’s tracks
But in open fields
Into sunsets and sunrises
Never looking back
As no one affront
And know time
Where mostly losers must collect
Outside
The whiner’s circle
And still
Fodder time
Will only
Weather win place or show
Every champ yon door
Will not cry out
As sum hoarse race
Only to whinny
But one race
In riding a loan
And won for awe
Jockeying honor
In steed
Bye only crossing
The finish line
In unison
As a singular knows
Tide for thirst
This poem plays with the tensions between the importance of both our inner experience and compass and our collective outer experience. Self-knowledge and self-awareness are prerequisites for healthy functioning in the world. Otherwise we will be doomed to project our ignorance and misunderstanding onto others, confounding communication and degrading joint enterprises. We must know ourselves and trust our inner experience and instincts, if we are to live our own lives. This recognizes a radical aspect of our own inner subjective experience: that part of our lives is uniquely our own, both in terms of being only indirectly verifiable by others (what’s going on inside) and that our own agency gives us responsibility that cannot be pawned off on others. To some inescapable degree, we must run our own race. Recognizing this freedom and responsibility is the key to winning our own race: Not around other men’s tracks/But in open fields/Into sunsets and sunrises. If we gauge our own lives too much by others’ behavior and the various cascading situations in the world, we risk living lives as mere reaction formations of our environment. While this is a profoundly sad loss for ourselves, it also robs the world of the gift of another real live actor in the play of life. Of course, human life is an ensemble role; we share a collective stage and have intertwining stories. Life is not a horse race, with the inevitable winner and losers — though that may be part of the narrative we act out. In sharing both a collective stage and the power of each to contribute their own role to the play, life is pretty much guaranteed to be dramatic, perhaps somewhat chaotic, and hopefully interesting and fun. Human life begs both individual creative response-ability and a deeply collective attitude and respect for our shared enterprise. A wise ensemble of actors, recognizing the varied roles of protagonists and antagonists, gladly plays their role, not another’s. And as passions rise, the story unfolds. The story is not won by who is present in the last scene, but who are present at awe, wherever they peer. If there is a larger winning in life, it may very well be the solidarity of comrades sharing passions, but not necessarily playing the same roles: In unison/As a singular knows/Tide for thirst. As for that horse race: break a leg…
