Run, Interrupted

Tragedy almost puts aggravation in perspective.

I run the same route every day. I read somewhere that not altering your run makes for less effective exercise, but I’m actually not running for the exercise. I run because it’s part of my routine, like brushing my teeth. I run to find my baseline. While I run, I like to mull things over. I have made up characters and plot lines on runs. On the topic of fiction, I have also made up believable excuses to tell people who have asked me to do things I don’t want to do. My mind drifts and percolates to the rhythm of my feet. I love that I know the route so well there are no surprises. Until yesterday.

I had started out: the slight downhill onto a busy street leading to the most challenging hill, the route etched into my muscle memory. I was still on the busy street part when I was confronted by something not in the hamster-wheel playbook I live my morning run by: a dead raccoon.

Damn. I’d been programmed to coasting through my run on meditative auto-pilot, and now this! I had to stop to allow cars to pass so that I could run in middle of the street, giving the roadside raccoon corpse wide berth. Then, I couldn’t get the raccoon out of my mind. That dead raccoon ruined my morning run, and I hated it.

Nevertheless, I continued, because of the hamster-wheel thing. A left, a slight downhill, and small uphill, a right, all the time thinking about the stupid dead raccoon that messed up my routine. But, then, I thought, if I was annoyed by the dead raccoon, image how annoyed the raccoon was to get killed by a car? Unless the driver was drunk or heartless, imagine how they felt, the thump of their tires over an innocent woodland creature? Imagine how upsetting it would be to live in the drab beige ranch that now had a dead raccoon in front of it!

We all see things from the POV of how we are affected, without considering how these same events have a deeper, even devastating impact on those directly involved. For instance, when we are vexed, stuck in traffic behind an accident, maybe we should imagine what it would be like to be the person under the drape being loaded into the ambulance, or the next-of-kin on the receiving end of that phone call.

These were my thoughts as I continued on the downhill slope toward home. I was suddenly filled with gentle compassion for the dead raccoon, though I really wished some vultures would come along to deal with the carcass.