thinking, narrating

Today I went for a run. I ran on the track for a half hour, listening to Elizabeth Gilbert narrate her spiritual journey in India as I huffed and puffed my way through two miles (not an extraordinary distance, but I haven't been running in a while, so it seemed longer than usual to me). I stretched to the sounds of my "I Woke Up In A Car" playlist, and stopped the music to do a yoga pose or two before I left the RB. As I walked out, I thought about what music I wanted to listen to next; and, as I consulted myself on the manner it whispered to me that I didn't want to listen to anything but the sounds around me. I obliged.

I started to observe the things around me. The street was fairly busy on 8th north (going past the Brick Oven), and I compared wryly the difference between 7:45 and 8:45 on a Saturday morning in Provo. The people I had seen at the track were the dedicated ones, or at least, moderately so. They weren't perhaps hardcore, but I saw nary a soul, nor a car when I walked to the track an hour earlier, so I figure to being anywhere at 8am Saturday shows dedication. I looked at other things, the people walking by me (two guys and one girl, discussing an episode of Friends). I saw that the parking lot by the tennis courts was still empty. I walked, and observed, and listened to myself, my observations being articulated flawlessly in my mind by the ever-dependable Liz Gilbert, naturally (if I had listened to The Secret Garden during my run they would have been narrated in a cockney British accent, presumably by Dickens). My mind drifted to the less immediately observable, and I thought about our western culture, and how it is so focused on achieving as opposed to accepting. I thought about how much better I feel when I eat fresh veggies and how I couldn't explain that to someone without making it sound like I just would like to lose weight.

I thought, "I wish I had someone to share all my thoughts with."