How

Most important is that I run. This is not merely an item culled from a list of my extracurricular activities, nor a boast meant as evidence that I am health conscious, but a beginning, a connection: if I did not run, I would not write essays. These two profoundly different activities are woven together for me: one physical, mindless enough so that dogs, rhinos, and rats do it, the other-How else can you say it?-cerebral, an activity reserved for the only animals capable of despair, delight, and reflection. I think therefore I am.

My body is an engine, a middle-aged engine, admittedly. The start-up is often rough; the beginning of the run, if I turned it into words, would be a litany of complaints. But inevitably, I get comfortable on the road, and shift into a kind of cruise control, in which my body moves forward of its own accord. A kind of forgetting washes over me then. It's not only that I forget the road, my beating heart, and tender knees, but what I think of as my daily self, the mother-teacher-datebook-keeper-member-of-the-community self. When this self is shed, my mind, another machine, begins to hum. The voice of my truest, most private self surfaces, and I drift into a kind of mulling state, a state in which I worry things. Not worry about them, the more sedentary, less productive activity done by my daily self. But "worry" as defined by Webster's Third: "to bite at or upon . . . to touch, poke, or disturb . . .To subject to persistent or nagging attention or effort . . ."

"Why?"

I ask, when I am out on the road. In this mulling state, I cannot will myself to address problems or think through things. I am dreamy and utterly unself-conscious, drifting through the easiest most trivial dilemmas-Enough broccoli for stir fry? Brown shoes or black?-until bigger things begin to rise.

Sometimes the "why" that surfaces is merely a question, not yet embodied. Or the "why" might be an image that continues to reappear, as if asking to be studied. Sometimes the why is embedded in a conversation that I replay or invent, a kind of auditory hallucination. Some of this mulling dissipates on these runs; the questions rise, float, and pop, ephemeral as soap bubbles. Other issues are played out later in conversation. But some of what surfaces on these runs keeps rising, demanding to be further mulled. These questions or voices become irritations, splinters beneath my skin.

Why

I am running one day, wondering why running and mulling are so inseparable for me, when it occurs to me that even as a small child, I felt compelled to mull, to "subject to . . . nagging attention" questions that did not seem to plague others in my family. Long after the toddler years, I was still bugging my parents with "why" questions.

Three miles into my run, I remember the cemetery we drove past on our weekly visit to my ancient grandmother, how I looked out the car window each time and asked:

"Why do we die?"

I imagine my parents exchanging one of those oh-no-not-again looks in the front seat, my mother, bored, saying, That's the way we're made.

"But why?"

"Because our bodies wear out."

"Why?"

My questions deemed a verbal tic, an attention-getting device. But, no, the need was real, the dismissive answers intolerable, even then.

Wearily: "Because that's the way it is."

"Why do they wear out?"

"Because I said so."

Several miles into my run, the questions I worry are often just as unanswerable. I ponder the fact that the world has so little patience for mullers. There is no room for our questions on an ordinary day in the domestic world or the world of commerce. We are the object of fun if we voice our cosmic concerns too often. Cuckoos. Navel-gazers. Obsessed.

"Because," the world tells us.

"Is and always was," it says.

"Because I said so."

"Just because."

Back on the road, motor purring, I wonder why I wonder and think of my dog, a terrier, from the Latin "terre," earth. He does not point or retrieve, could not pull a sled. But he needs to dig, this earth dog, at times so intent upon digging up a rock from beneath the soil that nothing can stop him once he starts. Passionate and fervent are the words that come to mind when I watch him dig. Is he looking for the rock of his dreams? Routing out the rock from hell? On the road I wonder if I am like my dog, born to dig. There is photographic evidence that this might be the case. Look! Here I am, in a photo at two years old, covered in mud, a literal digger. Perhaps there is a gene for mulling, the way some people feel there might be genes for patriotism and shyness. Maybe there's a strange trisomy which dooms the genetically challenged victim to ask and ask, incapable of accepting "because."

The teen-age years: I did not outgrow it.

"Better not to dwell on such things," said my parents. "Leave well enough alone."

"Looking for trouble," my mother called my speculations. When my tenacity, my relentless digging, really irritated her, she would say, "Stop already. Stop analyzing everything!"

A second theory: Mulling in opposition to the style of the rest of my family, as a protest against the heavy door of "because," the wall of "stop analyzing."

How

And so: I am the kind of person who is predisposed to writing (and reading) essays and has found a way to shake free of the worldly stuff and hear the voice of my true self. What do I worry? What problems are persistent and irritating enough that I take them from the road to the desk? I'd like to say that my range of subjects is limitless, but in reality, much of my work fits into what essayist Nancy Mairs only half-facetiously calls "the literature of personal disaster." To baldly list the disasters is an embarrassment to me-murder, senility, disability. But as Mairs points out, serious writers whose work fits into this genre don't write about adversity as a single monolithic event, the disaster as a disaster. While the adversity might become the background, the heart of the essay comes from one of what Mairs calls "the welter of little incidents" that make up the whole.

When I write about my daughter Rachel, who is blithely categorized by the world at large as a "special needs child," I don't write about her retardation itself. Nor do I replay secondhand sentiments that come in lockstep beside the word "retarded." For instance, I neither write (nor think) of her as "one of God's Special Children." I don't write about how fortunate I am to be her mother, or how much she has taught me. I do not adhere to the party line by claiming that adversity has made me a better person. (It hasn't.) I write about my daughter competing in Special Olympics or about the times I regret her birth. My daughter is fundamentally unknowable, because she lacks the language to describe her own moods, desires, and dislikes. She lives in a world she cannot understand, and that often fails to accommodate what I believe to be her needs.

What I believe . . . "I am Rachel's interior voice," I tell people, as if there is something amusing in this. In fact, I take this quite seriously. If writing essays is a clear assertion of one's voice, I supposed I could say that I write about Rachel to make her voice heard, and in opposition to the sentiments that diminish her as an individual, make her an indistinguishable member of a fuzzy, barely human category.

But often, when I am mulling on the road, it occurs to me that there is something audacious and obnoxious in my presumption. Who am I to claim to be the keeper of Rachel's consciousness? And yet, if not me, then who?

This is the kind of tension that cannot be resolved on a run, that makes me want to take to my desk, to shape what is hazy and unformed into something comprehensible. Once I begin to transfer my vague mulling into words on paper, everything changes radically. The private act of removing the splinter becomes an attempt to wrench meanings from my shapeless pondering. It is at my desk that I recall the the French root from which "essay" is derived. "Essaier," to try. I will try not to solve the problem I wish to work out on paper, since the most vexing problems escape tidy solutions, but to work through it in a way that makes my tale of interest to people I have never met.

An example

Some years ago, I found myself rather excessively mulling over the word "pleasure," wondering as I ran what pleasure was for a child whose responses were muted, who never expressed what she wanted, never complained when deprived of what she had seemed to enjoy. First the word itself: pleasure. syn: delight, joy. Why was I stuck on this? I asked myself.

An image formed in my head one day, a picture of pure joy: my daughter, shrieking and flapping her arms in a swimming pool. Without question, the water was something she loved. All I had to do was provide the opportunity for her to swim, to put her in the water, and I could say, "Rachel knows pleasure." But a problem was locked inside this seemingly perfect picture, for her physician thought that swimming induced her seizures, and suggested that perhaps I keep her away from the water. If we no longer took her swimming, would she recall that she had lost something she loved? Would she experience deprivation? Or did experiences, even pleasurable ones, simply vanish without any traces? Was the evidence of her pleasure worth the possible risk that she might have the kind of dangerous, intractable seizures that once she'd had in a swimming pool?

How best to tell this modest tale? I did not aim to write a philosophical inquiry into the nature of human happiness. I wanted to tell a small story with larger questions embedded inside it, a story about one child, unable to speak up for herself, a well-meaning physician, and a mother caught between wanting her child to have pleasure and providing for her safety. I used the techniques of fiction for this piece when I opted to give the reader a glimpse of our life, to show Rachel in the pool, to set off the drama between the characters.

When the form of this piece made itself known, I began to draft away, flush with grandiosity, convinced that my tale would be meaningful to others. Then one day, in the midst of what seemed to be a final draft, I found myself clutched by modesty and terror. What a puny, deeply insignificant story it suddenly seemed.

"Who was I?"

"My trivial life!"

"Who could possibly care?"

"How could I presume?"

A struggle that I now realize is inevitable for me, permanent, sometimes crippling, and yet of value, too, for it creates a tension, twists my self-effacement ("Who am I?") into a fierce desire to get the story right ("I am no one, but I must be heard!").

Perhaps if I were bolder or quicker, if I could tug on someone's sleeve and say exactly what I meant, I would not need to punch through my modesty on paper. But I cannot do it in person, and therefore depend upon my written words to say to the reader, "This is what it's like," and "This is what I think. This is my daughter. This is me. This is how we traveled in our search for accommodation."

The rewards: No fame, not much in the way of recognition, but the immense satisfaction of a single reader who says, "You found the words for me. " Or, "This is my life, too."

My satisfaction feels permanent when I hear this, my need to question feels forever quenched.

And it is, until I lace up my shoes and hit the road again.

* Jane Bernstein's memoir about Rachel, "Loving Rachel," was recently reissued by Coyne and Chenoweth. She teaches in the writing program at Carnegie Mellon University.