Question: Running is so closely connected with your path today, but it was not a few years ago. Why is that?

Sri Chinmoy: Good boy, you don’t take up everything at one time. First we try to do one thing and do it well. First we tried to accept spirituality as a whole. Then, after seven or eight years, when we felt that spirituality was accepted, we tried to open up a new course. You may call it a higher course or a lower course, but I will only call it a new course. If we had started running at the very beginning, people would not have accepted it. They would have thought the Centre was a running club. But gradually, gradually, people have accepted it. The same thing applies to our circus; now people have accepted it.

Also, we have to deal with the consciousness of America. Only for the last eight or ten years has America accepted long-distance running. Previously America was frightened of it. Previously, for America, speed was all-important. Like a bullet America wanted to run — faster than the fastest. Endurance wasn’t important. American speed and American endurance didn’t rhyme in those days. But the American consciousness has gone higher. Now America feels that speed is necessary and endurance is also necessary. Since the Goal is ever-transcending, endurance will always be necessary. So now America also believes in endurance.

Whenever America takes up one thing, it is only a matter of fleeting seconds before it does that thing well. How many excellent, excellent, super-excellent long-distance runners America has already produced, although long-distance running has been part of the American consciousness only for the last few years. Frank Shorter, Bill Rodgers and so many others have immortalised long-distance running in the consciousness of America in a few short years. When the consciousness of a country accepts a particular thing, that is the golden time. Ten, twelve years ago, it was all short-distance running. But now is the golden time, the opportune time for long-distance running. When the right moment comes we try to do the right thing. Again, even when we try to do the right thing, the hostile forces very often will stand in our way. We are doing the right thing at the right moment, but in spite of that we don’t succeed because of the wrong forces. But in this case, the wrong forces have not succeeded.