Creativity, Athleticism, and the Normal

Haruki Murakami is a Japanese author with awesome prose, original story lines, and as I found out recently, an incredible hunger for physical fitness. Since around the age of 27, he’s been training and participating in at least one marathon every year, and within the last decade has fit in time for triathlons. While never seeking a blistering time, he pursues personal goals: maintaining a competitive speed, finishing strong, and never walking or being disqualified. In his 2007 book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakami discusses his innermost thoughts on maintaining physical fitness as a means to maintain creativity.

Creativity

Murakami himself admits that he felt he lacked the creativity necessary to produce a novel until around the age of thirty, when for no discernible reason, he wanted to write a novel. Murakami frames creativity as some unintelligible quantity that can just pour out of somebody like water from a bucket, and most often, it does exactly that. A person finds themselves with a bucket of creativity, uses it all at once, and never sees it again. This leads to an artists’ “prime,” after which they might still be productive, but many people will say they lack the originality of their earlier works. Often, artists feel depressed because they believe they will never match their most successful level of creativity.

Athleticism

Working out, of course, causes strain on the body. Specifically, lactic acid. When you regularly work out, you create a tolerance to the toxic effect of lactic acid, and your body gets better at ridding the stuff. Of course, the best athletes work out everyday and have tolerances far beyond the average person. Murakami likens being “athletically fit” to being “creatively fit.” Just as an athlete needs to practice everyday, so do artists. Artists need to build up a tolerance to their creativity, lest it consume them in a flash and abandon them forever. Such a tolerance will allow a high-level of creative output in the future.

Normalcy

When I first started biking some 6 years ago, a 5 mile ride was normal. Then I went a little further, and a 10 mile ride was normal. Then a 20, and then a 30. By the time I was doing 30 mile rides 3 times a week, doing a 10 mile ride meant nothing. My level of normal had risen over time, and as such, doing anything less than normal meant under-performance.

So think about this in terms of Murakami’s likening to creativity. People practice being creative everyday, and many of them build up their abilities, and thus their tolerance. They’ll do something spectacular, a personal masterwork, and anything after that seems less than impressive. For those that feel that their creative peak has passed, they can build up a new tolerance, like returning to the gym.

While Murakami admits this book is a bit of an afterthought and an anti-climax, it’s a fine read to see a writer at his most raw level of talent. The writing is basic, the pace is quick, and the insights very simple. But building insight upon insight over the pages, the reader comes away having gained a lot of knowledge about one way to view the world.