A Windy Run

I was running alongside the wind-ripped waters of Riverside Park,

accompanied by my close friend whom I’ve known my entire life. It

was the first day of winter that felt livable, still cold, still windy, but

something in the air had softened just enough to make being outside

feel like a choice rather than a punishment. I had gone out to clear my

head. My legs felt light in a way they rarely do. I eventually found a

rhythm, each step calculated to avoid the lines of the concrete. The path

ahead was long and mostly empty. Above it, the grey sky spread out

in every direction, flat and enormous. I felt it press into me a little, its

magnitude leaving me aware of how open space can make you feel both

small and strangely free. The cold air screeched across my body, and a

burning sensation crawled over my fingers as they curled into a balled

fist.

Going for jogs, or sitting observing the people walking by on

the street from my window, bike rides, late nights on a rooftop, a

quiet walk from a friends house to my own, a bench overlooking

the water—these are all things I have been doing for the last couple

years to clear my mind from the jumble of stress and just from life in

general. The internal mess within my mind, contrasted with the slow,

seemingly unmoving world outside, always finds a way to stun me into

remembering and questioning why I am here.  Since I was a child, I was filled with questions. I would bother

my grandfather, my mom, and my dad, often with stupid, senseless

questions. For example, I once broke into their room at night, at only

six years old, to ask them if it was spring in Dubai. The question was

met with a pillow thrown at me, and my mom then asked me “why?”

A question that drives me crazy every time I sit and think by myself

is “why?”

It may sound stupid or silly, but as I sit here writing this, my

attention is constantly broken by smoke from the chimneys of the

apartment building next door and the one diagonally opposite it,

five blocks away. It roars around fighting the cold New York wintery

wind, only to slowly dissipate into something I cannot observe. I ask

myself: where does it go, why is it there, what causes it to exist, and

then cease to? I just noticed that as the chimney five blocks away

stopped billowing smoke, the American Flag parallel to it began to

rest. That makes me think of the obvious answer: that wind is what

causes this smoke to exist, and vice versa. Without the other, it would

be impossible to prove each of their realities from the place I am

observing.

Returning to my run down the riverside, if I had had a goal of where

I wanted to end up, it was not a physical goal; it was a place my mind

told itself I should aspire to run to. The place is irrelevant without the

goal. As I finally reached my goal, a small pier on 125th street, I felt a

wave of dopamine rush through my body, an effect commonly known

as runner’s high, a phenomenon explained entirely by science at a

hormonal level: your muscles tense, your heart beats faster, and your

oxygen intake grows. Your body releases endorphins into your system,

giving you a deeply euphoric feeling.

Thinking back to the flag and the smoke, would one truly exist

without the other? Would you feel such pleasure in your exercise

or these accomplishments without the “goal” or reward you set for

yourself? The question I am really asking myself is: what is life without

goals and expectations set by society. Because when the wind leaves,

the flag can rest. When I take my goal away from the run, there is no

underachieving feeling of failure if I stop early, because there is no

failure. In turn, there is no feeling of success when you reach this goal.

When the wind goes away, you are left with pure, unfiltered observation

of life, and a deep sense of peace.

Annie Dillard’s essay “Seeing” helps me understand why moments

like this—brief, vivid, and strangely moving—feel so rare and real. She

begins by remembering a childhood game, where she’d hide pennies

on the sidewalk and mark the spot with giant arrows: “SURPRISE AHEAD” or “MONEY THIS WAY,” hoping someone would stumble

upon her secret gift. The actual penny doesn’t matter much; it’s about

the idea that the world is always quietly offering us little, almost silly,

gifts of meaning. Most of us are too distracted or set in our routines

to notice. Dillard writes that the world is “studded and strewn with

pennies,” but her point is that you only get a lifetime’s worth of

meaningful days if you treat these small discoveries like they truly

matter. That’s exactly how I feel when I watch the smoke twist in the

air or see a flag suddenly go still. Nothing huge happens, but something

inside me shifts because I caught a glimpse of the world in motion,

evidence of forces I can’t control, only witness.

But what I’m really circling isn’t just the act of noticing, it’s how

having goals can actually get in the way of seeing. Dillard describes

“another kind of seeing” that requires “a letting go,” where she feels

“transfixed and emptied,” almost like wandering without a camera:

no hunting, no collecting, no scorekeeping. This is a feeling that

resonates for me, especially when I try to run without fixating on the finish line: not to slack off, but to resist turning my life into a one-

sided scoreboard. Dillard argues that true clarity can’t be forced; when the “pearl” appears, you can’t demand it. It arrives unannounced, like

“a gift and a total surprise.” So, maybe the peace I keep chasing isn’t

waiting for me at the pier on 125th street. Maybe it’s what happens

when the constant commentator in my head finally quiets down long

enough for me to really see the world again. That might be the twist.

The opposite of a goal isn’t failure; it’s presence. I’m still not sure if that

presence is just an escape from meaning or the start of a new kind of

meaning I don’t have words for yet.

Presence for me is more than just being somewhere. Not to sound

too cliché, but I’m not present when you are on your phone, doing

homework, or even playing a sport. I find it odd that being present

actually requires a conscious effort. Modern life actively drags us away

from this awareness and sells it back to us as a “skill.” I feel the present

most clearly in the small moments when I catch myself rushing to do

something non-urgent, take a deep breath, and return to my body.

Almost as if stepping out into the cold air after hours of being kept

inside, after an initial sting, clears you out.

Henry David Thoreau describes winter this way: “everything looks

asleep, quiet, and sealed under the snow, but beneath that stillness,

there’s hidden activity and warmth that never actually goes out.”

In Thoreau’s world, the most important things you cannot observe exist only when you center yourself and listen closely. Thoreau

would probably say that warmth doesn’t always come from what

we accomplish; sometimes it comes from what we finally notice.

He watches smoke rise from chimneys into the winter air, and he

treats it like a messenger, a scout that travels out into the world

before the person inside even moves. Like a person sending a plan, a

manifestation, or a worry out through the chimney while crouched by

the hearth. Not fully stepping into their own life, not being fully present

in the present. 

Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese monk, poet, and peace activist,

nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr., wrote

in his 1975 book The Miracle of Mindfulness that when we bring our

mind back to the body and establish ourselves in the present, we realize

there are so many conditions for us to be happy in the here and now.

This makes me wonder why we experience happiness and a rush of

dopamine from simply realizing we exist, and how that same feeling

can be replicated by setting and achieving goals, scoring the winning

point, and ultimately doing things to which we have ascribed meaning.

Is happiness achieved through nature or through society, and—just like

the wind and the flag mutually attest—can one be observed without the

other? To answer that slightly rhetorical question, according to Nhat

Hanh’s theology: No, it cannot. If we, as a human race, never set goals

for ourselves, our only source of happiness would be to find ourselves in

the present.

If we only set goals for ourselves, it’s as if we are building a garden

made only of fences and no soil, a sound structure, but lacking any

growth. Presence is the seed that makes your garden become real and

thrive.

In the end, what these moments by the river, Dillard’s quiet

discoveries, Thoreau’s winter stillness, and Thich Nhat Hanh’s

mindfulness all suggest is that life cannot be sustained by goals alone,

nor by presence alone. Goals give shape to our movement, something

to strive toward, but presence gives meaning to the movement itself.

Without goals, we may drift; without presence, we may achieve

everything and still feel absent from our own lives.

The flag is presence, the limp and still thing that needs something

to push against it to become itself. The wind is ambition, direction,

the goal that gives the flag its shape. Without the wind, the flag just

hangs, but without the flag, the wind has nothing to lift, nothing to

prove it was ever there. The flag needs the wind to reveal itself, just as

ambition needs awareness to become something more than pressure.

Real happiness, then, may not come from choosing between nature and society, striving and stillness, but from learning how to let them exist together.

The final truth I keep returning to is that peace is not always waiting

at the finish line; sometimes, it is already here, in the cold air, in the

rising smoke, in the simple fact of being alive enough to notice it.