Running on Empty

Running, Creativity, and the Artist as a Vessel

Solum Literary Press and Matthew J. Andrews

Jun 24, 2026

Welcome to the June installment of In The Image — a quarterly guest column on the intersection of faith and the arts, written by Matthew J. Andrews. In addition to serving as a previous poetry editor for Solum, Matthew is a private investigator and writer. He is the author of the chapbook I Close My Eyes and I Almost Remember and the full-length collection The Hours, which was published by Solum on Easter last year.

Purchase The Hours

Running on Empty: Running, Creativity, and the Artist as a Vessel

I’ve been a runner for a long time now, though my devotion to the sport has ebbed and flowed over the years. I’m in something of an intense period right now, piling on the miles, trying to up the pace, and generally working hard to outrun the signs of aging and mortality I see whenever I look into a mirror.

There are lots of benefits, both physical and mental, to running regularly, but one downside, at least for me, is that due to the general constraints of modern life and the nature of time, the more I run, the less I walk. This may not sound like much of a sacrifice, but going for walks has become a major part of my creative process. I spend those miles chewing on ideas, letting my mind water to new territories, trying to corral things into some semblance of structure. And I’m not alone in this; artists, philosophers, and thinkers from all throughout history have found walking to be an important step (pun intended) in bringing thoughts to fruition.

Is running all that different from walking? It very much is. Ideas can still come, concepts can still be worked over, but it happens (again, at least for me) much less frequently. When I run, my mind feels tethered, in no small part because so much attention is directed inwards, towards the body itself, monitoring perceived effort, my form, and whether I’m staying on pace. More than walking, running is an athletic endeavor, and my brain treats it as such.

With all this in mind, I was very interested to see that creativity was the focus of the cover story of Runner’s World’s Spring 2026 issue (yes, non-runners, such a magazine exists). The article itself was a free-flowing conversation between two very different artists: Harry Styles, the former One Direction heartthrob and 2:59 marathoner; and Haruki Murakami, the legendary Japanese writer who is a veteran of many marathons and the author of the cult classic What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. As you might expect, this dialogue—between artists from very different cultures, generations, and disciplines, both united by their love of running—weaves in many directions, but to me, the most interesting exchange got right to the heart of how running relates to the creative process:

HS: Do you find that you end up being creative while you’re running, or is it a time when you set everything else aside? Personally, I’ve found the hypnotic meditative aspect of music to have a lot of synergy with the meditative aspect of running. When I’m running is when I have…time to think a lot about what I’m making and other things in my life too.
HM: When I’m running, I’m just running. I don’t think much. I listen to music mostly. When I come back to sit in front of the desk I begin thinking, but when I’m running, I’m kind of empty. Something comes to me, but I don’t notice it. To be empty is one of my purposes with running. I feel that training your body is the way to create the perfect vessel, building a foundation for the ideas to come.1

I’m fascinated by these differing perspectives. For Styles, running is a dedicated (and meditative) time to think; this is what walking was for me and what I’d hoped to transplant into running. But Murakami presents a second option, one so foreign that it sounds like nonsense: I don’t think much; running as being empty; building a foundation for the ideas to come. This is a uniquely passive approach to the creative life, one that uses the fire in your legs and the heat of your rapid breathing to burn the brush from your mind, leaving behind a fertile soil for ideas.

Surprisingly, the more I think about these two approaches to running and art, the more I think about prayer. For most of my life, I assumed the only real way to pray was actively: you enter into a state of solemn attention and speak to God directly, voicing your concerns, your requests and petitions, your praises and thanksgivings. Let’s upset some theologians and call this the Harry Styles approach to prayer. But over the last year or so, I’ve been introduced to the idea of centering prayer, a radically different approach to praying. The practice is deceptively simple: you sit, quiet and still, for a select period of time and focus on a chosen word or phrase (“grace,” or “come, Holy Spirit,” for example). When your mind wanders, as it certainly will, gently bring it back to your chosen words, back to a stillness of soul.

This sounds like a modern practice designed to fold Christianity into trendy concepts like mindfulness, but there is a long tradition of contemplative practices in the faith. Here is James Finley, in his book Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God, giving an overview of the practice and anchoring it in Christianity’s mystical history:

Our role in contemplation is essentially receptive, in that when we are engaged in contemplation we receive a gift of divine awareness…The Christian mystics use the terms contemplation and mystical union with God to refer not to visions or other similar experiences, but rather to a life-transforming realization of oneness with God. In this mystical realization of oneness with God we are liberated from our tendencies to derive our security and identify from anything less than God.2

The aim—a life-transforming realization of oneness with God—is certainly a lofty one. And what could be simpler than sitting still and being receptive? But try to practice it and you will find it so much more difficult than you imagine. My mind is an unleashed dog, wandering here and there, barking at anything that moves, the very opposite of stillness. And then there are those nagging questions of productivity. When I pray actively, success (for a lack of better term) is achieved when I have said the things I want to say, but what does success look like when your job is just to be receptive? What does oneness with God look like? How do I know this is working?

At the same time, I can look back and see that in the times I’ve made this a regular practice, there are differences: I am calmer, less reactive, more patient, slower to anger, and more forgiving of mistakes. In other words: I am, if only marginally, more Christ-like. It’s in these moments of reflection where I start to realize how little I understand about the divine, how much unfathomable mystery is wrapped up in the word mystical.

With all this in mind, the Murakami method—emptiness as a turning of the body and mind into a vessel—starts to make a lot more sense, especially if you accept the idea, as I do, that creativity itself is a gift, one that requires its own kind of receptivity. This gives me hope that with art, as with prayer, there is no one way to the destination. There are ways to help bring you closer, but there are also ways to be quiet, to be empty, and find out that you were always closer than you thought.

Learn More About Matthew J. Andrews

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?