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.