By Christopher Cudworth

The Pretender (click link to video)

“I’m gonna rent myself a house in the shade of the freeway,

Gonna pack my lunch in the morning and go to work each day

And when the evening rolls around

I’ll go home and lay my body down

And when the morning light comes creeping in

I’ll get up and do it again. Amen.” –The Pretender, Jackson Browne

On the run with The Pretender

That song The Pretender by Jackson Browne once served as the thoughtful foundation for a 20-mile run on a gray spring day when it seemed no one else was on the road. Being old school at the time, I carried no water and drank nothing the first 17 miles of the run, when I finally bent down next to a faucet on the back of a factory and took the chance the water was potable. Drinkable. Suitable to ingest.

It was. I’m still here. Didn’t die from bad water or get found dead in a ditch beside a running trail. Nope. Never did nothing that stupid.

But that was dumb luck. Instead my stupidity seemed focused around other phases of life. Like not completely understanding office politics, or being too assertive about ideas, no matter how good they were.

And trying in between to figure out what love was all about.

Reason for life

Which is why The Pretender was so apt a song for a young man to sing on the run while trying to reason out his life. Of course, as a product of the 1970s there was plenty of angst toward life and the entire act of making money.  A song like The Pretender perfectly captured that angst.

But always with a Jackson Browne song there was more to the story than simple dissatisfaction with life.

“Caught between the longing for love

And the struggle for the legal tender…”

Thought for fuel

On and on I ran. Not tired or thirsty. The thoughts were too intense to allow such sensations into that run. Thought can do that. And thoughts turned to the women I’d known, or wished I’d get to know…

“I’m going to find myself a girl

Who can show me what laughter means

And we’ll fill in the missing colors

In each other’s paint by number dreams…”

Love was confusing then. Love is real now. You come to recognize love through experience. You don’t rush it. It’s like pacing yourself during a marathon or a long bike ride. Jump at the chance for a quick pace—on the run or in love– and you might suffer later. It’s not sustainable. But you dive into it anyway. Hoping. Feeling. Dreaming. Touching. Trusting.

“And then we’ll put our dark glasses on

And we’ll make love until our strength is gone

And when the morning light comes streaming in

We’ll getup and do it again

Get it up again…”

Studying facets of life

That long run long ago with a song like The Pretender going round in my head opened a few channels in life. The lyrics fed me as I ran on through 10, 12, 15 miles. The song was a diamond in my head, full of facets and gleaming truths.

“I’m going to be a happy idiot

And struggle for the legal tender

Where the ads take aim and lay their claim

To the heart and the soul of the spender…”

A realistic place

It wasn’t hard to realize that running even then, when it seemed like my whole world, was actually just a treat, like ice cream. Though I tried hard at the time to make it something more than that, running 80 to 90 miles a week, and winning some races, soon enough it dawned on me that it was time to move on from that type of dream. I may have quit competing a bit too soon. But at 27 years of age I was getting married. Having our first child. I had been Competition’s Son since the age of 12. It was time to find a realistic place in the world. But the prospects were daunting. They always are.

“And believe in whatever may lie

In those things that money can buy

Thought true love could have been a contender

Are you there?

Say a prayer for the Pretender

Who started out so young and strong

Only to surrender.”

We lose track of truth

Yes I fell for those lines, a bit, and the harsh reality they represented. But I also learned that the prayer for which the Pretender asks in the song can actually enrich you in different ways. Such as the fact that it is not that money is the root of all evil, but the love of money may lead you to evil things. That’s what the Bible actually says. We lose track of truth in such subtle ways.

Knowing the difference can make all the difference, and salvation lies between.

So in some respects I have surrendered to the realities of the song, but not entirely to the disillusionment it suggests, which can be tortuous if you let it hold you down, or to define you.

“I want to know what became of the changes

we waited for love to bring

were they only the fitful dreams

of some greater awakening…”

When you are running 20 miles you have lots of time to think, if you allow it to be so. And as I ran on, singing snippets of The Pretender over and over again, life stretched out before me as if the lyrics themselves were calling me forward…

“I’ve been aware of the time going by

they say in the end, it’s the wink of an eye

And when the morning light comes streaming in

You’ll get up and do it again

Amen.”

And that’s how most of us go about it. We make a living. And living makes us.

Sustaining hope

Running and riding while thinking things through is one form of sustaining hope for so many of us. We run and ride on, and find love, or lose it, or someone. If we’re luck or persistent, we learn to love again.

And make sense of the rest the best we know how. Earn our livings. Share our hopes and worth and trust. Make love in the morning light. Then go for a run in the shimmering early sun. Together.

“Ah the laughter of the lovers

as they run through the night

Leaving nothing for the others

But to choose off and fight…”

Running past secrets

We all go through difficult things in life and some try to keep them all secret. Pretend they don’t exist. That is the tarsnake of truth. Do things still exist if we never tell anyone?

But those of us who expose our souls on the roads by running and riding know that life is honest and hard and full of tests that can make you a better person. We create for ourselves a reality that faces those facts, or learn to accept them in more positive fashion when they come our way.

“Out into the cool of the evening

strolls the Pretender

He knows that all his hopes dreams

Begin and end there…”

The Pretender in all of us is the person who finds truth between the house on the freeway and the morning light that greets each day. We run toward the light at dawn, and away from the light at sunset. Then we come back home and greet those we care about with hopeful kind words such as, “How was your day?”

And we don’t pretend it has to be any other way.