A Place For Putting Yourself Back Together

I hadn't expected a stranger to make me reconsider how we put ourselves back together.

While running by the waterfront today, I came across two middle-aged women sitting on a bench along the path. It was a cold, gray day in the 20s; but the kind of light gray that feels hopeful rather than demoralizing. The water lapped gently against ice and sand up and down the shore. That's how I felt. I'm still just getting back into running, so I was focused on regulating my breathing and realigning my hips more than anything. I like out-and-back running routes. They give me an easy way to visually measure the distance, and it's one less thing I have to think about.

At my two-mile marker, I noticed the women on the bench. Rather than slowing down or turning around, I kept going. One of them was sobbing, and it seemed kinder to let them have their space without accidentally implying that their grief made me run in the other direction. I tried not to look, focusing on my breathing, but I managed to see the unmistakable posture of someone trying to console a person feeling very defeated.

Maybe a layoff?

Divorce?

Death of a loved one?

My mind started guessing what might have brought them to the waterfront. After jogging past, I became aware of the guessing game I was playing and was both fascinated and disgusted with how quickly I'd constructed the possible scenarios. Then I thought about my decision to go running along the lakeshore today and felt my head shake as I processed a thought: we're really not so different.

I'd sat in almost the same exact spot as those women when I was a college student, having just learned of a friend's overdose. Years later, during the Fall of 2018, I'd been running this same bike path along Lake Champlain almost daily to train for my first marathon. After living in Wyoming full-time for a year and a half, I'd spent that summer in Burlington, VT  before turning around and heading right back out west ahead of snowboard season. The marathon itself was in Portland, Maine, and after all that training, I showed up extremely hungover for it. 

When I moved back to Vermont full-time in 2021, this path along the water was one of the routes I used to get ready for the Boston Marathon, too. I was fresh off of a breakup at that point. Thankfully, I was also in the early days of getting sober, so I was not hungover for that one.

Today, running in the same spot again, I couldn't stop thinking about the differences between all the times I've returned to this place—of all the times I've used it to put myself back together. Same jagged rocks along the shore, same beachy smell even though it's a lake, same light gray cityscape above the path... full of both sadness and joy.

When I passed the women still sitting there on my way home, I just mentally wished them well without inventing any backstories.

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Our Daily MAP Year Prompt
194/365

Has the consistency of a place ever been your catalyst for change?

onward.

For more on this daily column and The MAP Year Project, read the backstory here. And if you know someone who'd appreciate this, pass it along.