Running

Today has been a day long in the making. Today marks the beginning of the end, the birth of a new month, and, soon, the close of another year in college. And it also marked the beginning of a lesson that I am now, in its entirety, beginning to understand.

Nothing ever ends.

My story begins with a typical Friday of the last few months; sleep deprived, I went to take my last Genetics test. Of course, it was obscenely hard; last year, I would have been in near tears at the feeling I had walking out of this test. This time, I simply shrugged. Amazing what a year's worth of experiences can do to a person; or rather, what Pacific can. O. Chem lab was mercifully quick; I checked out of lab in about an hour and a half. And then I took a nap.

My lesson, on the never-ending qualities of the universe, began when I went to take a run today. Outside. I had not done this for months, and so, I thought that taking a run in the rain would be refreshing, and something different. I was not disappointed in the slightest; the run was indeed invigorating, as well as enlightening. Not being confined to the walls of the gym, or the artificial slickness of the treadmill, I felt free, feeling real, polluted air run through my lungs instead of the recycled air in the gym. Seeing the cars drive by endlessly, a stream in a constant river, I also fell, feeling myself swallowed whole by memories as a younger man running along those same paths, stepping in and out of shadows both figurative and literal.

This entire year has felt like a marathon. Running constantly, never stopping, never yielding, never surrendering...I've come to realize that pinning all my hopes on summer as some sort of respite is a very foolish thing to do. We are all runners, constantly trudging along this path we call life, either dragging our heels along the ground or sprinting with the one-minded drive of a beast; we are always running, for there is no real end in sight. Any end we see is only temporary, a visage; something akin to the mirage of an oasis produced by a desert to a thirsty man. We will always have goals, always have something to strive for, to strive towards. And so, I finish the night off with a lesson learned.

I am beginning to understand that there is no end.