Marathon

In the story of the Battle of Marathon, a soldier runs himself to death in order to carry news from the the battlefield at Marathon to the citizens of Athens that the outnumbered Greeks have beaten the invading Persians. That's it. News of victory. And he died. So impressed are we by this one man's fatal endeavor that we repeat his race toward death millions of times a year. Why repeat an action that evidently killed the first man who tried it? Even if this fable is not historically accurate, it shows us something about what we value in humanity. We love to see other people put their own best interest aside in the pursuit of an impossible feat. It makes us feel like their is a point to all of our own suffering. The reason for trying seems to be a tautology: Suffering is useful because suffering is useful, just like the point of living is to live. We have faith because we must have faith, and so on.

Hm. There is a point, and every marathon runner has reached this point, where you are so exhausted by your own feedback loop of logic, nothing makes any sense. I have reached that place. I no longer remember why we decided to have baby. I only know that now we have one and he is in a hospital and we have to keep going with this crazy business because there is no stopping. I go to the hospital every day and watch my boy sleep and wake, get and give blood, breath and stop breathing, all the while fabricating a faith that one day, he will come home with us so we can start to be a family. I wonder, when that happens, will I see him as the marathon or as the person who ran it?