The Life You Keep Beginning

A sprinter is disqualified for a false start if they leave the blocks in under one tenth of a second after the gun. Not because that's cheating in the usual sense, but because human reaction time cannot physically move that fast.

Anything quicker than a tenth of a second means the body moved before the signal actually arrived, a beginning that wasn't really a beginning at all, just momentum borrowed from before the race began. There have been several beginnings in my life.

Some were planned, timed properly, the gun fired and then the movement followed. Some arrived because the old way could not hold anymore.

I was already moving before I'd fully registered that the previous version of things had ended. I used to feel guilty about the second kind, as though a beginning that started before I'd consciously chosen it wasn't a real one.

But the runner in the blocks doesn't get to choose the exact millisecond their body responds either. What matters isn't whether the start looks deliberate from the outside.

It's whether what comes after the gun is actually run at full effort, whichever way you happened to leave the blocks. I don't think that makes the beginning any less real.

It just means the starting gun for it wasn't one I got to fire myself, which turns out to matter a good deal less than I used to think. I've stopped auditing my beginnings for whether they were tidy enough to count.

Some races are won by people who left slightly late and simply ran harder for the rest of it.