What I Found in the Fog

Often you wake up in a fog.

Sometimes you willingly go into that fog.

Usually you find the fog was veiling beauty.

That was my experience this morning. Well, I won’t say I woke up in a figurative fog today, but I’ve been there plenty of other times. No, today I woke up to a literal fog. And I decided to go for a run in it.

What I learned along the way can be summarized simply: sometimes you have to willingly choose to run into the fog.

Here’s the thing, the fog may not be literal and so the running doesn’t need to be either. But rather than doing what we normally do when we encounter fog, we can choose to go purposely, actively, and with great effort, into it.

How do we normally react when we encounter fog? We tread slowly, cautiously — that is, if we move forward at all. Sometimes we just take it as an obstacle that can’t be crossed. So we turn around. And maybe even run in the other direction.

But what if we wake in the fog? That’s a different beast, right? Because in those times we have no sense of direction, no bearing, we don’t even know where we are, let alone which way we should go. We freeze, paralyzed by the idea that we’re lost. And it is that sense of loss of direction that makes us feel lost. The reality is, we still know where we are…