11/25/17

i'm thankful for the times when i find myself running on a strange road that doesn't have a sidewalk and the shoulder is nonexistent or narrow, so i end up either running in the road and worrying about getting hit by a car or running in the grass on the side of the road worrying about twisting my ankle or blowing out my knee on a hidden hole or not running at all because i'm too afraid of those things and instead stomping along annoyed and then i crest a hill or come around a bend and see a little stub of sidewalk in front of someone's house, one or two yards long, and the stub of sidewalk, functionally, is useless and honestly kind of ugly, a break in the aesthetics of the lawn, but i'm still thankful for it because it means that at some point in time in the past a person imagined a person might be running or walking down this road in the future and wanted to try to make that safer for them, for me. i'm thankful that though this kind of thing isn't enough, that if anything it's an illustration of how isolated individual acts, however virtuous, can't match the scope of the systemic problems they hope to solve, sometimes it's still nice, when you are alone on a dangerous road, to see a manifestation of a good intention.