Run as fast as you can

( Canon F-1, FD 50mm F1.4, RXP )




Running is the nature of children. They run in summer or winter. Under the sunshine or rain, here they run. You can say they are energetic. At the same time, they can be annoyingly restless.

Restless children are not only the fact of human being. When you watch some programs on Discovery channel, you realize even infant animals run around beside their sedentary adult counterparts.

Even though I used to be a kid, I can’t recall why we were running all the time. There must have been a very good reason why we were running around. The reason, however, has been buried into the deepest part of my memory that I can’t dig up.

I remember there were many banners on the hall way in my elementary school. Most of them were seasonal, such as “take care of the first graders” in spring, or “ware your caps” in summer, and so on. In addition to those seasonal banners, there were some that stayed the same all year. They said “do not run the hall way”.

In our class room meeting, we used to decide the motto of the week. From educational stand point, I would imagine that must have meant a lot of things: e.g. to find out the problems, to make it as the motto of the week, to choose one motto from the candidates by democratic way, etc. For pupils, it did not matter to us. All we wanted was to finish the meeting ASAP. The problem that was the easiest to sort out was nominated, and we decided it as the motto without through discussion. We did have a skill to wrap up the boring meeting quickly despite the educational theory teachers had.

There was no rules that the same motto could not be chosen. I remember that the motto that was most frequently chosen was “do not run the hall way”. There were two reasons I can think of. One was that a lot of pupils were running around the hall way, which must be the fact since prehistoric era. The other reason was that it seemed that it was such an easy motto to achieve. I can tell one thing, though. The fact that “do not run the hall way” was the one that was most frequently chosen exactly meant how difficult it was to achieve.

It is strange in a sense that I can’t tell when we stopped running around like those days. There is one thing, however, that I can vividly remember.


There were no banners on the hall way said “do not run the hall way” in my medical school.

( Japanese translation )