The giant burrito

I am trying to get back to a somewhat regular running schedule. The weather has finally been a little warmer and I had a weekend at home - so I went for an hour long run over the weekend (the longest since the marathon) and it felt great. Then I had a pretty tiring Sunday, refereeing most of the day; being around all this fencing and all the people two weekends in a row was a little intense. So this morning, I knew I really needed a good de-stresser run. I got to the park a little stiff so I stopped by a perfectly ordinary looking bench near the 72nd street entrance. I saw a lady standing by another bench just a few feet away. I saw her walking up to me as I had my foot on the top of the bench so I took off my headphones. She said to me: "Why do you have to stand in my line of sight when there are thousands of other benches in the park? You are a fucking liar and very rude." Yes, I swear, it was exactly what she said to me, at 9 in the morning, in Central Park. I was totally taken aback. The lady looked completely ordinary, nothing crazy about her before she started talking to me. I just said "Sorry" and moved over to another bench.

Something inside me snapped after this encounter. It was a Monday morning after a not so relaxing weekend or previous week, I just wanted to get away and have a nice run alone, just to listen to music and turn my mind off to be in the moment. I realized that the lady was most likely mentally ill, but still, her words were so hurtful and unexpected, that I started crying. It just all came pouring out. I was angry, mostly: angry at the lady, angry at myself for being angry at a crazy person who probably can't help herself, angry at Monday, angry at the unfairness of life, angry because sometimes I can't do the right thing even when I know what's right. It took a few moments to collect myself; now I looked like a crazy person, there was even a man who walked by me and look over and then he kept looking back at me with a confused look on his face maybe 5 or 6 times before I finally started running and passed him. This happens pretty often: when I am upset or angry, I just need to run as fast as I can. It's incredibly cleansing. If you push the body near its limits, the mind somehow falls away and all you have left is this shell and all this space inside it. By the time I stopped about 35 minutes and 4 miles later, I was in physical pain, but I felt completely at peace inside.

I once read in a book that when you really feel like crying, you should try to suppress it no matter what. The book was written by a neuroscientist and his theory was that negative emotions keep feeding on each other and so when one cries, he or she dwells on negative thoughts and emotions, which in turn build more negatives in the mind and it becomes a vicious cycle until one can consciously break it by stopping negative emotions from taking control of the mind. In general, I agree with this, but sometimes, tears can be quite cleansing. Just like sweating while running. In a way, I think about it this way: tears and sweat, they get rid of toxins and negative things if you want them to do so. Not by dwelling on the emotions, but by focusing the body or mind on something else and thereby creating space inside the shell that can then be a place for new experiences and emotions such as inner peace. Sounds a little new agey but it works, for me at least.

Then I remembered why I liked Monday evenings. I have been going to the same yoga class for a few months now, always on Monday evenings and then to get my Chipotle burrito always afterwards. I really like the yoga teacher even though I think she talks a little too much, but often, she gets things so right, things she says stick in my mind for a while. Tonight, she said that we should try to remember what it was like being children. So we did some silly poses, which were actually really hard and people kept falling over left and right but it was quite amusing and people started giggling and soon enough, the whole room had this great vibe and everyone was smiling or laughing out loud. She always comments on how seriously we take ourselves and how New Yorkers can never relax and always try to do everything so perfectly that falling over is really not an option. Except in yoga class which is based on the philosophy of non-violence and non-judgement. Then she said something I found beautiful: when is that point in life when success stops being measured by pleasure and starts being measured by money and position? What an insight! How true, when we are children, all we care about is having fun and playing. Of course, we grow up and things get a lot more complicated in general and a certain amount of seriousness is required to succeed in life, but seriously, why does everything have to be so serious? When did we forget how to enjoy ourselves?



Then I was reminded that there were indeed lots of good people in the world. The same woman always makes my burrito at the 52nd street Chipotle on Monday nights, and she recognizes me now, we usually speak a few words. Today she was extra friendly and I was so happy to see her smiling and being so nice, she gave me a little extra of everything so at the end it all just barely fit into the tortilla and for the first time in my life, I couldn't finish my burrito!