Wearing the souls thin.

There’s a strange and beautiful thing about physical exertion: when you’re running, when you’re pushing yourself to the edge of what you can do, something happens. You start to push yourself so hard that the rest of your body has to struggle to not be left behind: your lungs burn, your heart pounds, your muscles strain, and you start to drift away. You find beautiful random clarity. This clarity, though, is unlike what you find in the waking moments of a dream, or in the bottom of a crystal snifter, because unlike those, this one is bound to the rails of the tunnel that you’re screaming through to reach the light. It is the same force of will that keeps you from stopping or slowing down that keeps your mind likewise within its means. And when the only way you have to wander on a one-way track is faster, you find beauty at high speeds.

(I later realized that I may have stolen this from a Palahniuk book that I read last year.)