I’ve recently renewed my running passion. And of course when I’m into something, I’m into it obsessively. When I’m not running, I’m thinking about running, I’m planning my next run, or I’m eating to run, and now I guess I’m writing about running.

           Human beings are “designed” to run. We’re not the fastest animals in the world over short distances, but over longer distances, we are number one. It’s our ability to sweat efficiently which makes us the best. Over a one-mile distance there is a bunch of animals which are faster than us - cheetahs, horses, dogs, etc. - but once you exceed distances of about 20 miles, there is nothing that can beat us. We evolved this ability in order to hunt; we would spear an animal in open grassland terrain, and then we would run it down, that is until we domesticated animals and running became a whole lot less important.

           In the panoply of adaptations that make humans so impressive, there are really three stand-out qualities: our brains, which allow us to reason, develop culture, community, and transmit ideas from one generation to the next; our opposable thumbs which allow us to grip things tightly and with precision; and finally our ability to run, which made us the apex predator of the Savanna.

           It’s interesting that we’ve used our brains over time to make our unique qualities increasingly obsolete. We no longer need to run; in the sweep of human history we have run very little. Tools have progressively lessened the labor we need to perform. And now of course, we are on the cusp of our cognitive abilities being superseded by the very tools that we have created. Perhaps our defining human trait isn’t our strength or speed, but our relentless drive to invent ways of avoiding work altogether. And so, we run for the “fun” of it, as I’m sure in the years ahead, those of us that spend any time thinking will do that for the fun of it too.

           So, running: it’s probably the most primal thing we can do. It’s an activity which is tapping into our pre-historic humanity. We could say, running activates our warrior archetype. It brings us back into that world red in tooth and claw in which running down the antelope becomes our only means of survival. When we activate any primal archetype, it entails being in an altered state of consciousness; in that activation, the world is showing up to us differently.

           As Jung suggests, these archetypes are already located within us, all we are doing is awakening what is already within. Basically, these archetypes constitute our instinctual nature, and “happiness” or fulfillment, interplays somehow in the activation of these archetypes. This is what “awakening” (or individuation) within the Jungian framework kind of is; it’s when we use archetypes as opposed to archetypes using us - when they seize upon us and we become merely vessels for a particular archetype to manifest in the world outside of our awareness; this is definitely what we want to avoid. But using them, leaning into them where appropriate, this is what re-connects us to our most primal selves.