songs of experience

Yesterday I interiewed a middle-schooler, Asher Hertzberg, for my blog . . . partly because my daughter happens to be on his team (so I get to see him race every Wednesday and Friday) . . . but mostly because ever since Asher was a little kid I’ve enjoyed watching him run. Have you ever seen a foal racing around in an open field? That is Asher. As a Pacer tike, he would often burn off pre and post work-out energy by chasing his teammates to throw gatorade on them. I did notice the other day that when a girl chased the 12 year-old Asher to throw water on him, he wasn’t quite as eager to out-run her. Ahh, but that’s beside the point.

In my first of what I hope to be a series of grass-roots interviews, I asked Asher what it is he loves most about running and here’s what he said:

Asher: “I just like being out here in the nature and the trees, feeling everything around you. You kind of just feel, you know, more ONE. You don’t feel pressure like you do in your daily life; you just kind of get relief and you forget about all your problems.”
SoE: “What do you hate the most?”
Asher: “I don’t enjoy the nerves before racing, but there’s really not too much I don’t like about it.”
SoE: “I’ve noticed you seem to be handling the nerves so much better than you used to. How is that?”
Asher: “It just kind of came more naturally; I matured I guess. I went to this sports guy and he helped me out with that.”
SoE: “Can you tell me what suggestions he gave you because it might help somebody else.”
Asher: “Oh, well, he had this thing where if you hear this voice in your head it’s telling you you are going to do bad or whatever … take it to the front of your brain, back, to the side, and then you take it to the other side and then you take it down to your shoulder and then your hand and then you smack it!”
SoE: “Really?”
Asher: “And it actually … it works.”

Asher’s old-man maturity and wisdom, so marvelously and incongruously housed in such a fleet, sprite-like boy’s body, has me remembering William Wordworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;

Thank-you, Asher, for sharing your splendid vision.