Billings, MT

Songbird Creek Trail and other nearby trails

Run Time: 66:25 + 2:30 kick

My hotel in Billings was a relic. The Montana Trailhead Inn: 7 stories high, next to an old Convention Center. It has an open commons area with a piano, couches, and tables that you look down on from all floors — all rooms open onto a balcony. A trellised fountain rises 4 four stories on one wall — dry and apparently retired. The elevators are windowed to that you can watch as you rise or descend. I saw approximately 5 other guests in the time I was there.

The neighborhood is primarily industrial. I thought I could see some trails near the river on the map, so I headed that direction. It was a good choice. The entry trail ran past a large community garden, which was well-tended and full of vegetables and flowers. A few locals were working in their chosen plots.

Songbird Creek isn’t much, but it marks the end of private property and the beginning of green space, so it is useful. I ran west first. The area around the creek is marshy and forested. In one spot, I caught a whiff of death. Something had died down in the trees, probably something big, if I could smell it that strongly up on the trail.

Everything that lives, dies, right? Including each of us. Increasingly, as I move through each day, especially work days, I wonder about the value of what I am doing in each moment in relation to my own date with mortality. I’m definitely over halfway there. Meandering thoughts about what will happen when that time comes are starting to come out of the woods and accost me on the trail more often. I’m getting a whiff of death, and it’s disturbing.

I would love 20 more good years. 25 would be even better, but I’m not banking on it. At this point, it seems like a little blip of time. And yet, can any of us spend each remaining moment of our life in meaningful activity? And what is meaningful? How does the most meaningful experience translate to the afterlife if there is none?

Consciousness is the most blessed gift each of us will ever receive. How cruel that it will be taken away someday. I can feel extreme FOMO about the idea of not being here to witness my children and grandchildren grow after I’m gone, but it’s genuine existential dread to know that I just won’t be anymore. It’s not just the worst possible fear. It’s on a whole other level. I’m not sure it can be adequately expressed through language.

I don’t want life to end. I don’t want consciousness to end. I am not sure what is going to happen to my consciousness, but even if it extends beyond the end of my physical life, I don’t want to go an afterlife. I don’t want my soul to be blended into the collective soul. I want to keep right on loving my loved ones and working my crappy job and feeling the aches of aging and laughing at something funny and reading stories that entrance me and listening to the music I love. I want to go on running four times a week and writing my own stories and learning to play songs on the guitar and kissing my wife and rewatching TV shows that move me. I want to go on scooping cat poop and pulling weeds and doing home repair that I have no idea how to do but now I can just Google it.

I suspect that this world is the only world I’ll ever know, and this world is enough for me. But 80 years is not enough. Who knows? Maybe 800 years would be enough. I get it — our lives wouldn’t be so precious if they went on forever. It’s precisely because they are so short that we resist the end. Think of those lucky goddamned elves in the Lord of the Rings, who live in their 30s and 40s for 3000 years. Now THAT is fantasy.

I can’t bear to think of it, so like many, I try not to. I just pretend it’s not going to happen. And who’s to say that’s not the wisest way to approach it? What else can we do? I can live with intention and still do that. If I think about it too much, intention goes out the window.

Maybe something miraculous will happen. Maybe I’ll just move on to the next simulation, with all of the same loved ones surrounding me. Maybe I’ll relive this life over and over. If my consciousness ends, it ultimately won’t matter for me. That thought I do not find comforting. Maybe all of this is one dream within a larger consciousness. That doesn’t comfort me either.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but death is scary. I just listened to an interview with a Buddhist professor who has received a diagnosis of terminal cancer. His strategy is to lean into it, to look forward to it, to be curious. I find that so brave. Is that the way to approach it? Not, “I’m ready for it,” or “I don’t want to go,” but more like, “This is going to be interesting.”

Can you tell me what’s going to happen, Norm? Can you send me a sign? As I finished my run, in my last 10-minute running segment, my playlist was in the D’s, and the last song for the run was “Death Is Not the End,” by Bob Dylan. How’s that for irony?