Dette er tittelen på boka til Richard Askwith som jeg leser om dagen, og han har en del veldig fine betraktninger. Legger ut noen smakebiter – som virkelig handler om “re-connection”. Undertittelen på boka er da også “A runner´s journey back to nature”.
Det første sitatet er fra s. 85ff:
… My parents´generation … weren´t afraid of weather despite being fare more exposed to its effects than we are. Their whole relationship with the physical world was different. They understood how things worked: their machines, their homes, their factories and, not least, the natural world around them. They knew how to make things, how to cook things, how to grow things – rather than just buying cheap packaged things that other people had made, cooked or grown for them. They looked after themselves, on the whole, without much help from anyone else. And it wasn´t a big deal.
We might look back on that generation´s lifestyle as unsophisticated…. But they endured two world wars and the Great Depression, then quietly got on with building the safe, stable, comfortable world in which I grew up. What, meanwhile, does our twenty-first-century sophistication really amount to? Most of us are pathetically dependent: on technologies we don´t understand, fuelled by resources we don´t have and paid for with borrowed money that no one in their right mind will want to lend us for much longer. Take away our oil, our electricity, our credit, our friendly satellites and telecommunications networks – or even just one of those pillars – and many of us would barely be able to function. Are we really so smart to have forgotten how to live in simpler ways?
Og videre på s. 87:
… There´s a powerful feeling of reconnection as well as empowerment when you rediscover simple skills; a swense of getting back in touch with instincts that are fairly central to what it means to be human. Without such reconnection, you are missing out.
Perhaps that´s why I get such pleasure from my running these days. I am, in some sense, running naturally. Every day I experience sensations that would have been familiar to most runners in history.
Etter å ha lest ferdig boka er det spesielt dette at løping er mer enn konsum og HMS jeg sitter igjen med. Dessuten hadde han noen levende beskrivelser av “man-hunt” og “hash-running”. Ting jeg aldri har hørt om før. Bokan kan absolutt anbefales!
Askwith, Richard (2015) Running free
Yellow Jersey Press – Vintage