Grace

What is grace? I think of it as a sort of beauty associated with movement. A dance can be graceful, but a symphony or a painting cannot. They have a different sort of beauty.

It can also refer to human interactions. When done tactfully and considerately, leaving nobody feeling awkward, or worse than they need to feel, they are graceful. Somebody that deals with others in a way that is unnecessarily rough and hurtful ‘lacks grace’.

I think there may be a connection between these two. I’ll think about that later. But for now let’s think about the grace of movement.

I am a huge fan of graceful movement. It doesn’t just have to be dance, which is often designed to be graceful. It can be found in the most unexpected places.

Since my third year of high school I have enjoyed physical activity and being fit. In my youth that included going in cycling and running races. In later high school I trained hard on my bicycle, and the fitness gained from this equipped me to win our annual school cross country race. That then put me into the team for the inter-school races for our region – the Southern Districts of New South Wales. I was at a Catholic school and I think we competed against the other catholic and non-government schools in that region.

I nearly always came third in these inter-school competitions. There was a boy from another Canberra school that came second. I think his name was David Rowe, but I am not sure. What I am completely sure of is that the winner was always Andrew Reardon, from Saint Patrick’s boarding school in Goulburn.

I didn’t see much of Andrew in those cross country races. Just a pair of heels disappearing into the distance as soon as the starting gun went off. If we were running on trails in the pine forest, as we often were, my only goal was to keep him in sight so I could follow his route and thereby avoid taking a wrong turn.

In summer we would have inter-school athletics. I was chosen to represent my school at the middle distance events, of which I usually chose the 1500m and 3000m races. Again I usually came third, but this time I got to see Andrew Reardon in action from closer quarters, and not just from behind. We often raced on lovely, smooth grass 300m tracks that belonged to the richer private schools. A 3000m race was ten laps, which was enough time for Andrew to get to being on the exact opposite side of the track from me – 150m ahead – so I could see him running from the side. And what a gorgeous sight it was! He seemed to just float over the ground in an effortless manner with a grace that words cannot describe. It felt like watching a gazelle or a cheetah in a David Attenborough film, except that cheetahs are sprinters and would probably keel over if asked to run further than 400m.

Any feelings of envy or competitive resentment just leached out of me, as I just felt so privileged to watch this graceful performance. One would say it was poetry in motion if it hadn’t been said a million times before. But the loss of my competitive urge didn’t make me slow down. Rather I increased my pace so that the distance between us didn’t get to more than half a lap and thereby degrade my view of this majestic performance. I imagine Andrew was just cruising at what was a comfortable pace for him, while I was gasping and spluttering. I expect he could easily have accelerated and lapped me quite soon had he a mind to do so. If so, it was a demonstration of the other sort of grace to not subject me to that humiliation. Noblesse oblige.

What was it about his running style that touched me so? I want to say rhythm and symmetry, but that has a connotation of mechanistic, and it was anything but mechanistic. Relaxation was another key aspect, and machines are not relaxed. Andrew looked like he was playing, or floating. It was like a Brandenburg Concerto in vision. You had to be there.

Thereafter I worked on making my own running style as relaxed, symmetric and rhythmic as I could. This wasn’t just vanity. I also believed that running that way would use less energy and allow me to run faster. Perhaps it worked a bit. I did get much faster over the next few years, and some people were even kind enough to say that I had a ‘nice running style’.

The last I saw of Andrew Reardon was in late 1980, when I saw him on telly, which was showing a NSW schools championship athletic meet at Hensley Field in Sydney, which was then a lovely, smooth grass track (now it’s synthetic). It was a 1500m event, which he won reasonably easily, I think in about 3:52. Watching it on telly, without being distracted by my own attempts to run, I could revel in the joy of this exhibition of perfect movement. It was great.

I sometimes wonder what became of Andrew Reardon. Did he become a farmer, as many of the boys at that rural college might have done, or did he move to the city and become a businessman? Did he grow a middle-age paunch as most men do (Oh no!), or did he keep himself trim? Does he still run?

Shortly thereafter I was struck by the running of another Andrew – this time the Australian representative Andrew Lloyd. I saw him on telly, I think running some national championship meet, at perhaps 5k or 10k. He too had a beautiful, relaxed style, seeming to glide along as if his feet weren’t even touching the ground. I remember he was wearing a cap, which runners would generally avoid as an encumbrance, and making it hard to dissipate heat. But it didn’t seem to trouble him. He looked so cool!

In my university days I trained sometimes with athletes at the Australian Institute of Sport, since that was in Canberra and so was I. So I got to see Andrew Lloyd up close while training, and to admire his easy style.

He was involved in a horrible road accident in the early 1980s in which his wife was killed and his elbow was smashed. When he recovered, his elbow was, if not fused, swollen and difficult to move, so his style became lopsided and a bit awkward. But he was still very fast. I think he won the City to Surf a few years after that.

Grace is not a pre-requisite for being a fast runner. Contemporary with Lloyd was Laurie Whitty, a runner with a famously ungainly style, but who won national championships and represented Australia. One of the most famous ever distance runners was the Czech Emil Zatopek, who apparently had a very ungainly style. There is not much film of him running because his heyday was in the fifties. Australia’s most prestigious 10k race is named after him because he won in the 1956 Melbourne olympics and apparently really liked Australia.

Have you noticed that the lululemon logo looks very similar to a capital Omega: Ω? It also looks a bit like the emblem on the Torres Strait islander flag.

In the early eighties I was heavily influenced by a book by Percy Cerutty, who coached a number of brilliant Australian distance runners, including Herb Elliott, who held the world 1500m and mile records and won the 1500m at the 1960 olympics in Rome. He advocated a very nature-based training regime, involving only natural foods – mostly raw – and running on sand hills, beaches and in forests rather than on athletic tracks. But the most memorable – to me – aspect of his philosophy was his claim that through too much soft living, adult humans had forgotten how to move naturally. So to learn how to run properly, and fast, we should watch how other animals do it.

Cerutty disdained symmetry. I don’t know what he would have thought of Andrew Reardon. Percy thought human running should have different modes like a horse – trot, canter and gallop, in order of increasing speed. While trotting is symmetric and may be suitable for marathons, cantering and galloping are not, and he thought they should be used for distances of 10k and shorter. I remember running on the beach when on summer holidays trying to imagine myself as a two-legged horse and transition from trot to canter and then to gallop as I sped up. It seemed to work but maybe it was all psychological. If you imagine yourself galloping then you feel fast and, to some extent, that makes you go faster.

I remember seeing some visiting African athletes jogging about in tracksuits on the training track in Canberra, while preparing for a race on the main track that was next door. They just looked so flexible and bouncy, as if every movement was joyful play. That was another manifestation of grace.

Enough about athletics. That is just one example of where grace can crop up unexpectedly. It is there in hurdling and high jump and pole vault as well as in running. Maybe we could even see it in shot put, but we might have to look a little harder.

Grace seems important in Zen, although it doesn’t seem to be identified or named as such. In the Japanese tea ceremony, great importance is placed on the way one moves in preparing the tea, in serving it, and in how one drinks it. I love the way the cup is offered with both hands and a bow, and is received in the same way. This translates to the way that business cards are presented, and even how purchases are handed across in a shop. I try my best to remember to participate in such small but special rituals. When in doubt, use two hands and make a slight bow!

I have never mindfully raked pebbles as Zen monks sometimes do, but I imagine grace plays a role in that as well – watching the intricate patterns made by the pebbles as they are disturbed by the rake tines and then resettle in their wake.

I think if we look hard enough we can find grace in many things that move around us – humans, other animals, trees and bushes in the wind, even inanimate objects. I try to find this when I feel disheartened. It helps a bit.

I think again about the role of grace in human interaction. The grace is in the speech acts, in the words said, the tone in which they are said, and in accompanying gestures and facial expressions. I suppose all of these are movements. On a simple level, they are movements because speech comes from movement of body parts – lips, tongue, larynx, lungs – and of the intervening air that carries the sound waves. On a more abstract level, they are movements because they are expressed over time, and movement is defined in terms of time. They cannot be captured by a still picture – although a skilful snapshot can hint at it. Even more abstractly, they are movements of emotion – a communication of feeling from one being to another.

I would like to cite an example of a well-known graceful interaction, but my memory fails me (I imagine there are lots from Barack Obama. He is a very graceful person). Nevertheless, we all know what they are and have witnessed and valued them. They catch our attention particularly in difficult circumstances – when somebody turns aside aggression or insult, or rejects a crude suggestion, without aggression and without making anybody feel bad. When somebody finds a way to include somebody that is excluded by their difference, without making a big deal of it. When somebody finds a way to show solidarity and support for somebody that is grieving, without patronising them or putting them in a position where they are obliged to respond.

Then there is grace shown by somebody under extreme pressure – be it their own tragedy, anger, fear or anxiety. When they surprise us by expressing and taking care for things beyond themselves and their worries, despite all.

I don’t know whether it’s the same sort of grace. Classifications rarely matter anyway. But it seemed worth mentioning.

I resolve to try to be more graceful in my relations to other living beings, rather than just in how I run.

Andrew Kirk

Bondi Junction, August 2019

PS I just remembered cricket. I couldn’t send this off without mentioning the joy of watching a truly graceful batter. How they can deal with a heavy red projectile fired at them at up to 160 kph by a small, subtle flick of the wrists that sends the ball to the boundary for four runs. Watching really good batting is like watching a brilliant dance. It’s not for nothing that cricket enthusiasts, more than in any other sport I know, keep photos of their heros in action – in the execution or the aftermath of one of the wide variety of elegant shots available to them.