The Gift

"That’s the real beauty. A spiritual odyssey draped as an athletic adventure."- Rich Roll

Last year began like the last few that came before: excitement, hope, and a renewed optimism of possibility. All of this came attached with a heavy dose of cynicism that’s drafted behind me for the last few years.

I lost my brother-in-law in 2018. He was the pride and joy of my wife’s family and her baby brother. Who she not only loved deeply but admired and protected. His death was sudden and unexpected, as the deaths of most 23-year-olds are. There are no words that can adequately describe the blow of losing him.

A funeral ceremoniously marks the end of one’s life, but it’s just the beginning of the grieving process for the family. Before his death, we didn’t think life could possibly get any better. Unfortunately, this time, we were right. Over the next few years, we experienced depths of hell we didn’t know existed. It felt like God clipped our wings.

The grieving process is humbling. Life seems to have lost its meaning. The idea of the future is no longer exciting; it’s unbearable. It’s impossible to imagine a time when you don’t feel as bad as you feel today. You feel helpless. You’re fighting to hold onto a time that no longer exists. The permanence is too much to bear. No matter how badly you wish you could reverse time, it continues its relentless and apathetic march ahead. Our lives have stopped dead in our tracks, yet everyone else keeps living as if nothing’s happened. How do they not understand?

It’s not fair. We knew that life wouldn’t be fair, but not like this. This was outside of our expectations. It felt like God broke a promise to us. The pendulum of our lives has swung from order and a (false) sense of control to chaos. We cling to anything to restore order and feel a sense of control.

What followed was a series of successive lows without much reprieve. Each one seemed lower than the one before. It was enough for me to question what I’d done to deserve it. There are few things worse than feeling like you’ve fallen out of favor with the universe.

Then, I had a dream. It was at what might’ve been my lowest low when everything seemed to be working against me. In that dream, he appeared to me and said, “Don’t forget about the gift.” It woke me up. It felt profound and maybe even prophetic. But it also pissed me off.

Gift? What fucking gift? You’re gone. Our lives have been destroyed. I don’t know if we’ll ever climb out of this dark pit in hell. What “gift” could possibly come from this?

Grief changes you. On one hand, it can be liberating. It strips you of everything you thought was important and forces you through a re-evaluation process. It has the power to dissolve your ego and pull you out of the trance of meaningless societal games. But, it can easily destroy you. And that’s what it did to me.

My reality was shattered, life was chaotic, and I felt like a stranger to myself. It was so uncomfortable that it forced me to change. I hated the person I’d become and couldn’t help but think that if I died today in my current state, I would be pissed that this is the way my loved ones would remember me.

But first, I had to process what happened and accept my life as is. I found myself reading more about existentialism and purpose. I read about God with a skeptical eye. I watched hours of YouTube videos about people with near-death experiences who gave testimony for the afterlife. I was looking for answers or a new perspective to help me make sense of it all.

I wrestled with grief, death, life, God, meaning, and purpose. I knew what agony felt like. I understood the meaning of apathy. I experienced a full spectrum of human emotions at a depth that most don’t. Yet, I held onto the belief that life couldn’t possibly be this bad forever. This was different from optimism. I felt something that I hadn’t in a while— faith.

Faith isn’t a destination, it’s the path itself. It was a bridge to the other side of my suffering. I realized that it’s impossible to see the light when your back is turned to it. With faith, I began to make progress, one tiny step after another. With each trusting step, my vision of the future became clearer. But this transformation couldn’t happen only in my mind. I wanted to feel it physically.

There’s something about the physical pursuit of a goal that makes a transformation more tangible. I wanted to feel alive, and the only way I knew how to do that was to push myself physically and try things that scared me. I wanted to play just beyond the barrier of my comfort zone. I wanted to see what would happen when I tiptoed just beyond the limits of reason. I leaned into that fear. I wanted to explore the depths of my consciousness. I was curious.

I found what I was looking for in the strangest of places: ultrarunning. This fringe sport has been exploding in popularity in recent years. And it’s easy to understand why— it’s the lowest barrier to entry of extraordinary human feats. All you need to start is a pair of running shoes and an indomitable will. The latter can come after.

Running 50 or 100 miles at once should be impossible. But like the 4-minute mile, our only limits seem to exist only in our minds. Now, people are running that distance at elevations equivalent to the height of Everest. They’re doing it in the hottest and coldest parts of the world, and they keep pushing the envelope. 135 miles in Death Valley. 240 Miles through Arizona. Then, there’s the last-man-standing type of event where a Vegan school teacher named Harvey Lewis ran 450 miles over 4.5 days non-stop. We continue to search for limits in human performance, but we find them only in ourselves. The game is seeing how far we can push them.

There’s a saying that people only enter extreme endurance sports because of one of two things: a midlife crisis, or trauma. I guess I’ve found my way here through both. I’ve become consumed by the beautiful game of exploring the limits of my mind. It’s given me so much in these two short years and changed me in ways I wasn’t expecting. It’s given me a place of refuge. A place to learn about myself and what I’m capable of. It’s given me a renewed sense of belief in myself. It’s helped me enjoy the process and prioritize it over the outcome.

No one run is the same, but the best runs have one thing in common. A few miles in, something happens that can’t be fairly summed up as simply a “runner’s high.” As my muscles get warm, my stride syncs with my breath, my eyes gaze steadily upon the horizon, and I allow myself to let go. The last thought that runs through my mind is that "my body might hurt, but I’m fine." I feel free.

I’ve tried to interpret the dream for the last few years. Could the gift be the empathy and love that I now feel for others who are grieving? Could it be that it’s led me to explore and attempt to understand my life’s meaning and purpose? Or that it led me to change as a person for the better? Or that, in some strange way, it led me to running, which has changed my life in countless ways? Or that I even looked for a gift amidst all this suffering?

They say don’t pray for strength, because God won’t give you strength, he’ll give you opportunities to be strong. What I’ve learned is that sometimes, the greatest gift comes to us through an obstacle, challenge, or loss. It’s not the thing that changes us; it’s who it forces us to become when as we navigate it. Change brings with it a forced adaptability. The skills, lessons, and perspectives we gather along the way forge us into a better version of ourselves. That’s the gift.

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