songs of experience

Recently, I attended a seminar on The American Conscience and I came across an excerpt from Jane Addams’ Twenty Years at Hull-House:

“Sometimes the suppression of the instinct of workmanship is followed by more disastrous results. A Bohemian whose little girl attended classes at Hull-House, in one of his periodic drunken spells had literally almost choked her to death, and later had committed suicide when in delirium tremens. His poor wife, who stayed a week at Hull-House after the disaster until a new tenement could be arranged for her, one day showed me a gold ring which her husband had made for their betrothal. It exhibited the most exquisite workmanship, and she said that although in the old country he had been a goldsmith, in America he had for twenty years shoveled coal in a furnace room of a large manufacturing plant; that whenever she saw one of his “restless fits,� which preceded his drunken periods, “coming on,� if she could provide him with a bit of metal and persuade him to stay at home and work at it, he was all right and the time passed without disaster, but that “nothing else would do it.� This story threw a flood of light upon the dead man’s struggle and on the stupid maladjustment which had broken him down. Why had we never been told? What had blinded us to the hidden artistic ability of this father? We had forgotten that a long-established occupation may form the very foundations of the moral life, that the art with which a man has solaced his toil may be the salvation of his uncertain temperament.�

I have thought a lot about this passage as it relates to why I continue to train hard at the over-ripe age of 43. I crave strenuous work-outs in much the same way Addams’ goldsmith craved a piece of gold to work on/with. Whether I was/am training to make an Olympic team or running simply to “solace the toil” of motherhood, it is not a gold medal I seek, but the pure, artistic act of engraving – hills, intervals, long runs – that hard training provides. Hard training for me may well be “the salvation of [my] uncertain temperament.â€?