Story 1 - The run
I went for a run today. It was a decent run, 7 km, at a very respectable speed and sweat production rate. The run wasn’t special, I suppose, it was what came with it that mattered. The side effects of this cure for the body, which touched the mind. The longer I ran, the further away the stiffness in the neck and the squinting of the eyes seemed to be. I felt… well, not much. In the whirlpool that our lives are, my mind, even if just for a respectable time of 40 minutes, stood still.
Not completely still of course. It registered everything around, and bounced from an object to a smell, to an elderly couple having a picknick on the side of the cycling path I was pounding my feet into, and back to an object. I’ll return to this later.
Why do I like collecting stories? They are like little glittery glass stones in the kaleidoscope. They might seem not all that on stand-alone basis, but if you combine them in a complex mechanism, which our life is, they will shine (all by themselves, no help necessary, other than just a bit of light) in impossible, far-reaching ways.
I love stories, I always have. I read them, watch them, observe them, try to live them, but have never written them down. Secretly, because I am afraid to fail in portraying them in the way worthy of the stories themselves. Can I be a tuned enough kaleidoscope to let those shiny pebbles show mosaics of life, so illusive, yet so real and beautiful? Can I?
I guess my biggest fear in life is to fail at it. The subjectivity of this sentence is almost appalling. The failing comes in so many shapes and forms, and depending on an angle and perspective, the failing shines differently to everyone. My failing has always been being slow, being not the best in class, being not the strongest in the room, or the wittiest. As of recently, my failing is not showing up. Not saying yes to this exiting opportunity of actually trying something out. If in the end of the journey, there is nothing out there waiting, the journey itself will have been worth all the trouble.
I want to tell the stories I have of people I’ve met, people I’ve been, people I’ve been with, and people I solely imagined in my head.
If there is one person who reads the stories, and finds the mosaics of the kaleidoscope amusing, or useful, or funny, or evoking any emotion whatsoever, - this endeavour had been a success.
They say, a long journey begins with a single step. I nourish that thought in my head now that I am somewhat put off by the insurmountability of the task at hand. I will take it from step to step, and will try to just show up. If I don’t win the Olympics on this one, that’d be ok. If I get the attendance award - that will be enough for me to know I won. I won from Doubt, and Settling, and Boredom, and Failure itself. Those are pretty tough opponents.
Back to my run. I observed people I saw and gave them stories. It was not really a giving process at such, as I tried to uncover for myself the stories that they, of course, knew all along. Having calmed down, my mind finally stopped running in circles around my own life and (undoubtedly highly important and largely interesting) events in it, and tried to raise the rim of the curtain into the lives of others.
A couple of Arabic decent, in their late forties; the lady in a head scarf, fully dressed in black, covering the entirety of her body sports attire (while I was slightly abnormally sweating in crop shorts and a tank top), the man much taller and clearly faster than her, yet keeping the same pace. The park, as charming as it is, is not very big, so doing two rounds is an understandable necessity, which led me to pass the couple 3 times on my way. I got to have a good look.
The lady kept getting more and more out of breath but she kept raising the pace of her leg strokes and did her best to keep up, her cheeks blossoming more in pink. The man, holding his small beer belly in a graceful balancing act of jogging and simply briskly waking, kept talking and smiling, barely out of breath. They spoke Arabic, in a soft way only two people, who have been all their life used to share thoughts and secrets with each other, can. The first time she told him a secret, she was 17, and he was smoking a self-rolled cigarette at the backyard of a high school, and she told him about her (very bold) ideas to maybe even do an HBO level education after this, and become a teacher. Heck, maybe even a social worker. He listened, inhaling deeply and grimacing slightly while exhaling, as the smoke was back then still foreign to his body, still too sharp on the back of his throat (not any more, long not any more).
The moment they started telling each other secrets, they knew, their lives would be very difficult should they decide not to connect them with one another, connect with a string of events, from moving to the Hague together, to living in the same neighbourhood, choosing for each other in every tiny way only 20-year-olds really can, making insignificant, barely noticeable sacrifices, here and there, to make sure that she would be near him, her raven eyes watching closely his every victory and every set back, her little hand tightly clasping his. 20 years, 3 kids, 2 neighbourhood upgrades and one fleeing affair of his later, they both decided to take up running on Sunday mornings as yet another way to spend time together and share some secrets. On the first 400 m that morning, they met me, smiled politely and continued at a pace too slow for him and way too fast for her, but together, as always.
