terraria

i'm thankful that lately i have been trying to find new routes for my runs. i'm thankful to recognize what a difference novelty in terrain and environment and choices of direction and road can make for my (mental) endurance and my satisfaction. i'm thankful, since it is so easy for me and my brain to fall into the grooves of routines and patterns and wear them down day by day into arid valleys, to recognize how running for me is at its best when it's not just a way to maintain my physical and mental health (though it is always that at the base level, and i don't want to take that for granted) but when it's undertaken in the spirit of exploration, a way of accumulating through exposure a new knowledge of a space.

i'm thankful that i started out thinking i was going to run in a direction i never really have (northwest) to this park with a tall bridge across the river and then turn around when i got there there and run back. i'm thankful that the route was simple and the weather was really nice, the next part of the route gently curved around the banks of the river. i'm thankful i ran through a university campus i hadn't seen before (i'm thankful to have been reminded how much i loved running around campus when we lived in bloomington) and when i got to the bridge, i decided that i wanted to run across it (since i love going across a high bridge) before turning around, and i'm thankful that in the middle of the bridge, i decided what if instead of turning back, i just kept going down the other side of the river and then crossed back eventually, and i'm thankful i indulged myself in that.

i'm thankful for the stretch running through the shipyards along the other side of the river, a sort of abandoned (because it was the weekend) and silent industrial theme park (i think , such stretches of abandoned parking lot. i'm thankful for a stretch along a rail yard near union station where i was running next to a train that was slowly chugging in parallel with me and it felt like i was running in sync with some kind of leviathan. i'm thankful that because i had water from my water bottle i didn't feel hollowed out as i sometimes can and i'm thankful that i thought "is this the day i finally run twenty miles" but discovered then that my phone battery was dangerously low because i had not been babysitting it (i'm thankful that my body's battery has greater capacity than my phone battery) and didn't want to keep going longer without having podcasts or music to listen to so i set it on airplane mode and turned the screen brightness all the way down and crossed back to our side of town at the first bridge i could find and headed home (the battery didn't make it all the way but turning down the brightness to 0 did make it hang in there at 5% and then 2% for a surprisingly long time). 

i'm thankful for a detail that i love about terraria, which is that the game, like minecraft, at first seems to be built around digging down into the ground, but that also you eventually discover you have the ability to build towers and ladders and rope bridges and climb upward into the sky (and under the ground you can also find, for example, potions that will invert the gravity of the world causing you to suddenly fly upward). i'm thankful that as you build and climb higher and higher, the color of the sky changes to signify the changing atmospheric conditions and eventually you're in a field of clouds and then you notice, jumping off the platform you've built, that some of the clouds are solid ground and not empty vapor, that they have buildings on top of them, little palaces that you couldn't have seen from the ground, and that inside those temples are even more exotic objects that grant you new and exciting abilities. 

i'm thankful that though i can't climb to castles in the sky, i can run in whatever direction i want, and i'm thankful to feel the joy of playing with the direction.