The Wherewithal of Life. Michael Jackson

I will see her in the evening. And even Maria likes to say that she’s going to work when she leaves for kindergarten in the morning. She says that kindergarten is her workplace, and she says, ‘Come and visit me there.’ So how could I tell her, ‘No, I am not going to work, I am just going to sit here the whole day.’ That would not make sense to her. So even though this might seem trivial to you, it killed me basically, it cut off my feet. I was growing older but not doing anything. Changes were happening to me, but I was changing nothing.”

      “How did you pass the time when you were here on your own?”

      “I hate to admit it, but I watched television. Can you imagine yourself watching television and not even bothering to check the mail for responsesfrom companies you’ve written to. You are even too lazy to do that; you don’t want to think anything outside of what you’re seeing there; you don’t want to think about the job situation and the frustrations associated with it. You concentrate only on the television.”

      “Did you ever go out?”

      “Well, I took up running. I ran. This became my focus. One kilometer, fifteen, but not because I wanted to get fit or feel fit. It was to avoid the apartment, to get away, to do something rather than nothing.”

      I told Emmanuel about a Sierra Leonean friend of mine who had spent more than a year in prison as a political detainee, expecting every day to be led from his cell to be executed. Even though S.B. Marah was in solitary confinement, he would spend time every day running on the spot, imagining that he was running through the streets of Freetown. At every place he passed, he would say aloud where he was. “I am approaching my house now, I am getting close to home, I am coming to the compound, I am saying to Rose, ‘How are you? How are the children?’”³¹ S.B. called this routine his “exercise,” but it was not simply a physical exercise; it was a technique of existential survival.