I’m not sure whether you’ve ever seen the way a group of teenagers react when parents come home early and break up a secret kid party, but that’s how practically every animal I hiked past on my trail run-turned-hike looked today. It was so overcast and drizzly it was as if everyone – from an enormous, stunned raccoon strolling along one of the people paths to the littlest squirrels slowly savoring various snacks out in the open – had memorized the drill: there was no way any visitors would show this afternoon. But some did.

There is something about a perfectly still lake that reminds me of the wonderful childhood experience of making good friends as a kid and, after contemplating the beauty of one today, for practically the first time ever, working out in the park was tearful.

Maybe it is because the design-build crew working downstairs has loudly been playing a classic rock radio station for weeks now that serves as a reminder of so many past eras (who knew Metallica was classic rock?), but today’s nostalgia was of a different sort. For some reason, sometimes when I remember particular experiences of connection-building, joyful progress, or even a confluence of the seemingly small coming together for good after I’ve prayed, it feels less like I’m recalling some lost piece of random history than reconnecting with what is always present and indigenous to myself – and everyone. (Even though the echoes of past experiences still sometimes feel nostalgic, I love the idea in Course in Miracles that “each bird that ever sang will sing again in you. And every flower that ever bloomed has saved its perfume and its loveliness for you” and believe this applies to every good thing.)

Normally, when I run, the thought crosses my mind that it’s actually become impossible for me to so much as imagine, much less remember, feelings of sadness. What is sad?, I find myself pondering. And why would anyone ever feel that way?

This has been a welcome change. I realize I’ve addressed it at length on this blog already, but during the period when I felt so trapped by the Larry King Live management team, I remember noting often that I couldn’t recall what it felt like to be happy. I don’t think I could even imagine feeling so, which was a bizarre and alien realization; and running did not change it. (How many miles per day did I run just to be able to go on?) A few years ago now, when I saw the first season of the Morning Show program, I related to the sacrificial character’s implied feelings of being silenced and minimized by her company but was glad to have turned to running instead of, like her, anything like cocaine. I did not watch the second season of the show after seeing it advertised with a trailer within which an executive presses a main character – meaning one who was allowed to live – about what she and other women were going to do now that they’d exposed gender-based discrimination in news as I felt the producers of this fictional program were just as involved as anyone in effectively suppressing ideas and solutions proposed by the actual women’s movement in corporate journalism.

I heard an advertisement anyway yesterday for a blanket that evidently heats up so much that the wearer can work up a sweat that rivals a strenuous workout for the way it can encourage the release of toxins and metals. But I doubt it. The real thing is always better.