Month: June 2022

I have been thinking a lot about the rhythms of place.
Where I live, where I have lived for most of my life, regardless of what country I’ve lived in, is in the suburbs, the orderly suburbs, where things are mostly the same day over day. We park in our own driveways, in the paved sea of white hatched spaces that surround every building, in our assigned places. I swing wide and park my big car haphazardly, pull through so I’m facing out if I have the chance. I grew up this way: in suburb after suburb. High speed roads with raised sidewalks.

Last week I went for this little loping jog on the beach, just chugged along as close to the surf as possible, near the packed sand, but the tide was coming in and my sneaker got soaked so I moved up further to where the sand was dry and my feet were sinking and my gait was graceless. This was on Memorial Day and the beach was a bit crowded and as I clumsily loped past a pair of young men, they kind of pointed and clapped, which at first I was embarrassed by but then I shouted to them “This is so hard!!!” And they cheered some more and said “We love you!!! You can do it!” let’s do the work, even when it’s clumsy and graceless and wouldn’t be objectively impressive to anyone else. Cheering for you. I love you. You can do it.