Rainy Day Women

    This morning I went for my usual long Saturday run, followed by an amazing cup of coffee and breakfast cookie. The weather was nearly perfect: light breeze, low humidity, sunny but not overwhelmingly hot. We took a new trail on the advice of a stranger we had passed last weekend, and it ended up being one of the best run routes I've been on this year. The only downfall was that despite wearing my new shoes, the first third of the run involved numbness in my feet. But, after re-lacing my shoes I was back on the trail. I could have given up or focused solely on the issue of misplaced shoes. Instead, I problem-solved, because the shoes were interfering with my goal to run. 

    Why the running preamble? Recently, I've been thinking about mindset, thinking patterns and so forth in relation to perseverance. What is it that sets people with positve outlooks apart from those who don't? In university, during a neuroscience class, we were told that reality, and hence the human experience, is nothing more than the function of a nerve impulse. In these terms, what we experience is nothing more than chemicals crossing a barrier and exciting neurons. Part of me appreciates the simplicity of this idea, and yet another part of me thinks that deconstructing existence to neuronal activity negates the beauty of experience. I suppose it does explain different thinking patterns, as levels of neuro - transmitters would determine reactions to stimuli. And yet, this morning on my run, it felt like more than that. Maybe it was just a "runner's high".