On Friday, I went to Grafton Street for a one-hour drink with Mike Stopa, my friend and collaborator. It’s a good way for both of us to wind down after a week of hard work. We have met together two weeks in a row now, and this weekly gathering may become a tradition. The week before, we were accompanied by a few members of the lab as well.

From left to right: Myself, Ville Bergholm, Masoud Mohseni, Ivan Kassal, Patrick Rebentrost and Mike Stopa, two weeks ago (June, 2008).

Mike and I were talking about many things, ranging from family to our new collaboration unraveling the secrets of the chemical enhancement effect in SERS. As we were about to leave, a friendly waitress interrupted us to tell us that Haruki Murakami (Wikipedia, Official site) had been sitting behind us throughout our conversation. She had asked him if he was “the writer,” and he nodded and asked her for her name. We couldn’t see him, since he had already left, but Mike told me that Murakami was a runner.  Mike and his wife Hiromi saw him running in the Boston Marathon a few years ago, and that Hiromi shouted, “Gambatte, Murakami Haruki!” as he ran by. Our short Grafton Street encounter ended this way as we parted to our divergent evening plans. I have been thinking about Murakami, because while I was on a trip to Mexico recently, I read The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, a magical-realism novel that impressed me with its uniqueness, so I have been thinking of reading more of Murakami, besides the two or three novels of his I have read. Sitting at the table next to “the writer” without knowing it, in a way, re-enacts the writer-reader relationship all along. I got a similar feeling when Javier Marias mentioned me in passing in a thank you note written to my friend Jeff Pretes a few years ago: “I cannot recall if I know your friend Alan Aspuru.” He indeed does not know me, but I have read all his novels. To close this loop, this week’s issue of The New Yorker includes an article by Murakami on how he started running and writing novels at the age of 33. Murakami writes at the end of his article,

At any rate, this is how I started running. Thirty-three— that’s how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that F. Scott Fitzgerald started going downhill. It’s an age that may be a kind of crossroads in life. It was the age when I began my life as a runner, and it was my belated, but real, starting point as a novelist.

I am 31, turning 32 in less than a month, and I feel as Murakami says he felt at 33. He talks about how he started running and that helped set the pace of his life. After being a bit sick in the last two weeks, my main personal priority is to start doing more exercise. I also feel that this is a moment when my science career is taking exciting turns day by day, as probably his career as a novelist did. Murakami talks about perseverance, a quality one needs to be successful in any field:

No matter how much long-distance running might suit me, of course there are days when I feel lethargic and don’t want to do it. On days like that, I try to come up with all kinds of plausible excuses not to run. Once, I interviewed the Olympic runner Toshihiko Seko, just after he had retired from running. I asked him, “Does a runner at your level ever feel like you’d rather not run today?”. He stared at me and then, in a voice that made it abundantly clear how stupid he thought the question was, replied, “Of course, All the time!”.

In my opinion, this feeling is universal and applies to science as well. Some days you don’t want to write a paper review, resubmit a paper, or write the next two pages of a grant proposal. But as the Olympic runner does, one needs discipline and self-motivation to move on. Gambatte!