Three Quick Notes

• Sunday I went running for the first time in years. I did a simple walk-run workout, i.e., I walked for 2 minutes, then ran for 2 minutes, then back to walking, alternating each for a total of 22 minutes. I covered 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers). I found out the way I had been taught to run in college was all wrong, and I'm re-learning how to run, so it will be slow going for a while.
  
• I finished Gordon Marino's excellent anthology Basic Writings of Existentialism, and I recommend it. As any really good anthology does, the book has me wanting to read more by some of the authors represented, especially Kierkegaard and Camus. Also, the excerpt from Sartre's essay "Existentialism Is a Humanism" is the best summary of Sartre I've ever read. I wish I read this essay before reading Being and Nothingness.
  
• That being said, I can say affirmatively that I am not an atheist, and am only an agnostic in the strictest, most limited definition of the word, namely, that I don't "know" that God exists. I believe God exists, not out of some logical proof, but because I need to believe God exists. It is a matter of faith, and a matter of acknowledging, like Douglas Coupland's narrator in Life After God that:

  "I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love."