11/7/2022: 4.88 Miles
Started my run in the dark thanks to my old pal daylight savings, but even so it was obscenely muggy and hot outside this evening. I don’t care what people have to say about New England weather being random and unpredictable; the same is true everywhere. This simply isn’t normal, and I’m certain that my eternal nemesis climate change is behind this nefarious change in weather.
I know I should be grateful to have more time to enjoy the outdoors and read my book on various park benches, but I’m ready for the cold! Let me be able to comfortably wear sweaters and sip hot chocolate already. And you already I’ll be complaining the other way come next April. We’re all way too picky about what the weather gives us, and nothing really seems to satisfy us. But hey, it makes for some great small talk.
Speaking of small talk, I’m trying to figure out how to make small talk with the people of Boston. Or big talk. Or any talk, really. I just feel like there must be some way to engage with the communities I’m running through. It is all about love and running for me after all, and while running has always been a great medium for self-love, it can be hard to share that love when your brain is a bit addled from oxygen deprivation. If I could just give individuals compliments, or tell them loudly that I love them as I dash by, that would be at least a small act of kindness that I could inflict upon these people I pass every day.
I am privileged to have running bring me beyond all other identities I might have; running puts me in a space in between, in an identity that I understand only as runner. As I ran up the street towards my house, I was running in the space in between the bike lane and the sidewalk, because runners belong in neither of those spaces. We are given no place on this crowded road. But we dance on the curb in between the two other spaces already filled, perhaps stepping here and there into one or the other as necessary, when streetlamps and fire hydrants already fill up our limited space. We find our own ways forward. A path that only we can make. It is for this reason that I want to forge a path of kindness through my sport, a path that may lead nowhere for some. But perhaps it could lead to a happier mental space for others.
I don’t know if I could really succeed with some plan such as this one. We live in a very disconnected society, full of social boundaries that often feel impossible to breakthrough. But I find it’s nice to imagine worlds where people have the time and tolerance to hear one another out on busy streets, and where a runner has the confidence to burst out in fits of friendliness to such people before jogging ever onwards, hoping that they inherited just a bit of the joy he was feeling so thoroughly.
Don’t really know if any of that is realistic, let alone sensible. But that’s what got pumped out of my brain today. Tim’s still running regardless.