The Last Bucket

In my most recent display of utter insanity, this morning I actually woke up and headed directly outside – no getting dressed, no bathroom stops, do not pass GO, do not collect $200 – straight out!  Once outside, something told me that I wasn’t even properly dressed, or hardly dressed at all, and so back inside I went.  A hardcore 5AM Runner would have just continued on and started running in his underwear, but… I guess I am getting soft in my declining years.

But we are not here to talk about underwear, insanity or even about the price of tea in China.  I am simply here to share some of the experiences, thoughts and flashes of brain activity that occasionally occur during these lengthy runs.  As my mind wanders off somewhere far away, some of the clearest, yet also incredibly weird thoughts and conclusions pop into my head…

Like for instance, something I watched on TV the other day – which had to do with crabs and their behavior, but is amazingly true in many other respects.  I bet you had no idea, but here it goes: if you place a crab in a bucket all by himself, he will easily crawl out!  However, if you place the same crab in a bucket with many other crabs, they will pull each other down and any one of them attempting to climb up above all the others will immediately be pulled back down by his bucket-mates…  And so all the crabs end up sitting in the bucket forever…

What a powerful concept!  We have all experienced this, I am sure, being trapped in a bucket of established ideas and proven dogmas, trying to escape the reality only to be pulled back down by the overwhelming majority of other people’s expectations.  Isn’t it possible that the other crabs around you may not necessarily know the best way?  Maybe they are only moving around instinctively, simply imitating all the other crabs around them?  Isn’t it at all possible that your best scenario may be to get away from the crowd mentality and find your own way out of the bucket, whatever the bucket may be…

Oh, what do I know, it probably serves me well to get some sleep and knock the senseless thoughts out of my head.  But for the time being, I hang on to my routine and simply

Keep it running!