Stuart Connelly's Blog - Posts Tagged "parables"
New Year's on the Run
Exactly one year ago I suited up in Dri-FIT for a New Year's Day trail jog along the creek in my favorite county park. The weather seemed tolerable enough for it -- though I don't tend to enjoy wintertime runs -- but more importantly, the day seemed appropriate for it. I don't care much for New Year's resolutions, but this wasn't about an exercise regimen I wanted to lock into place. It was the beginning of a big year for me, and I wanted to collect myself, assess my approach to the next twelve months.
What I like best about these wooded runs is the isolation. I was in the planning stages of shooting my first film ( The Suspect , just completed this month) and craved the time to plan out the undertaking. A workout on the first day of the year was a chance to focus, gather my long-range strategy. For tax reasons, I had one year to make a feature film start to finish, finance to fine-tuning. No extensions, no excuses. Nothing focuses the mind like a deadline. So there I was, beating out a decent pace, lost in thought. Running with an iPod chock full of music by a composer I'd been lucky enough to corral into working on my project before I even had the first investor dollar in the bank... when I started to understand I wasn't alone after all. I couldn't see another living creature, but the baying of the foxhounds clued me in, s l o w l y penetrating my freezing cold earbuds from the woods off to my left.
You see, I live in hunt country. And without my realizing it, I'd gone running on the one day in this particular park where some local club was doing their thing, whipping through the forest chasing after a fox. Soon the soundtrack of my hypothetical film was drowned out by the thundering chaos of the hunt. And then suddenly, the prey -- a beautiful red fox -- darted from the woods and skittered onto the snowy trail directly in front of me. He stopped dead still and stared at me. I stopped, too. Killing my momentum. Something I try hard not to do on a run. But this creature, this tableaux, had me in a tight grip.
-- see more at the Huffington Post here
What I like best about these wooded runs is the isolation. I was in the planning stages of shooting my first film ( The Suspect , just completed this month) and craved the time to plan out the undertaking. A workout on the first day of the year was a chance to focus, gather my long-range strategy. For tax reasons, I had one year to make a feature film start to finish, finance to fine-tuning. No extensions, no excuses. Nothing focuses the mind like a deadline. So there I was, beating out a decent pace, lost in thought. Running with an iPod chock full of music by a composer I'd been lucky enough to corral into working on my project before I even had the first investor dollar in the bank... when I started to understand I wasn't alone after all. I couldn't see another living creature, but the baying of the foxhounds clued me in, s l o w l y penetrating my freezing cold earbuds from the woods off to my left.
You see, I live in hunt country. And without my realizing it, I'd gone running on the one day in this particular park where some local club was doing their thing, whipping through the forest chasing after a fox. Soon the soundtrack of my hypothetical film was drowned out by the thundering chaos of the hunt. And then suddenly, the prey -- a beautiful red fox -- darted from the woods and skittered onto the snowy trail directly in front of me. He stopped dead still and stared at me. I stopped, too. Killing my momentum. Something I try hard not to do on a run. But this creature, this tableaux, had me in a tight grip.
-- see more at the Huffington Post here
