Jogging is the new best thing you can ever do with your life. As of… right now, at this second.
Do you want to know how I figured out how serious this was? I’ll tell you that: when my professor, currently orientating me through a research project I’m doing about Nuremberg interrupted me while I was passionately talking about some old white males and the implications of their actions on the whole world. I’ll try to find a way to tell you all about my project without sounding like Jesse Eisenberg soon. Sorry Jesse.
“Sorry. It’s my jogging club. We’re doing the SM thing on Saturday morning”
The SM.. thing.. is actually running through the whole perimeter of an almost abandoned shopping mall near campus. I actually wanted to write about this to you because I found a way to make sense of it and connect it with my own life, as I write a niche less newsletter and everything is about me anyway.
I wish you could make sense of how many people are actually running through a shopping mall parking lot over and over again when Monday comes. Monday, 06:45am. It’s packed. It’s interesting how there is little to almost no one on Friday. Also 06:45am. That made me think of life.
As I’ve written to you recently and said that writing is that itch on your back you have to scratch (I want 10% if you’re selling that as a bumper sticker), I want to make an addition and say that the gift of writing is the gift of encapsulating everything mundane (apparently meaningless fragments of life), combining that with life changing feelings and experiences you only have once or twice, and creating something you’ll never be able to properly explain. You’ll never put a finger on it.
All of this to say that writing doesn’t have to be about when you really feel like waking up at 06:45am on a Monday, and you’re really excited about life and you really want to just go out and kiss someone and jump and scream and puke afterwards and !!!!!! But also, it really doesn’t have to be about when it’s Friday and you feel like telling everyone to fuck off of the face of the earth.
I wouldn’t say writing is exactly happiness. I mean, it shouldn’t be about that. It’s not the high of Monday morning laps when the world feels lit from within, and it’s not the emptiness of Friday when you want nothing to do with anyone. It lives in that narrow seam: not joy, as you work with writing and being happy with work feels criminal at times, not intense sorrow, because you’re not 13 and writing a dark romance novel because some guy named a)Theo1, or b)Aiden, or c) Dylan or d) all above dumped you. No, we’re past that, you and me.
For those of us who live and breathe words, it’s about the uneasy thrill of something almost indefinable. It’s so uncomfortable at times, it can almost drive you crazy.
Like jogging circles around a mall, writing is mundane until it isn’t. One day, at 6:45 a.m., it will feel different. It has to. It’s a human activity. Right?! I wonder if any of those people have had sudden epiphanies or paragraph ideas while running around in circles. Maybe I should join them.
Writing is jogging.