The Inner Runner by Jason R. Karp

Author:Jason R. Karp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2016-03-08T05:00:00+00:00

CREATIVE AND IMAGINATIVE RUNS

“I’M FEELING GOOD NOW, AND I’M GOING TO STICK WITH THAT.”

If you run down Haight Street in San Francisco, you’ll come across The Gallery, a small art studio with a 1960s-looking storefront, nestled among other 1960s-looking shops in the well-known hippie district of Haight-Ashbury. Inside The Gallery, a fifty-five-year-old, African American man with a gray goatee and a beanie sits on a stool and paints on a canvas. His artwork, much of which depicts scenes of San Francisco, adorns the walls.

Ronnie Goodman is a self-taught artist in San Francisco. He’s been painting on and off since he was eight years old. His art, he says, is inspired by the beauty and diversity of San Francisco, balanced with the struggles of human despair.

“With my brush, I try to capture these raw emotions in painted images of the city,” he says. “I have a story to tell. I think I have a lot to say. Being an artist is very hard to make a living. The most important thing is that I don’t give up.”

When Ronnie Goodman isn’t painting, he runs. He runs up to fifty miles per week on the streets of San Francisco when training for a half-marathon, often wearing a Tamalpa Racing singlet from the local Tamalpa Runners running club. He’s run a few half-marathons, including the San Francisco Half-Marathon in July of 2014, which he wanted to run for his birthday.

When you get to know Ronnie Goodman and talk to him about his experiences of being a runner, it doesn’t take long to discover that his running and painting are intertwined. He speaks from his heart, yet is often nonchalant about things, brushing them off as if nothing special. “Running helps inspire me as an artist,” he says. “When I get stuck creating a piece of work, running helps me step back from the canvas and helps me put ideas together. I can look at the canvas in my imagination.”

Creative and imaginative thinking is arguably the pinnacle of cerebral function. It requires seeing things or ideas that are not already there. Many of us strive for it. There are lots of intelligent people with high IQs, who have memorization skills that rival those of a Broadway actor reciting a Shakespearean soliloquy. But to make those words come to life in a way that makes us believe that the actor is the character he or she is portraying, stirring something inside of us that makes us leave the theater different from how we entered it—those are the ones we look up to: the creative ones, who have original thoughts, who come up with ideas that leave us wondering how the heck they did it. Most people want to be more creative. I’ve met only a few people in my life who have said they’re not creative and were perfectly fine with being that way.

As a writer and entrepreneur, my livelihood depends on my creativity. But creativity is more than just a living for me; it’s a lifestyle.

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