There’s a popular saying that goes along these lines:

One day you’ll do something for the last time, and you won’t even know it.

When you see this, what’s the first thing that pops into your head? Is it playing outside with your childhood best friend? Is it spending hours playing your favorite game on your old console? Is it skipping class to go hang out with your friends? Whatever it may be, we have cycled through a lot of routines in our lives that have since been left in the past.

For me, I thought of running. The long distance, all-terrain, gritty type of running. Running was something I’d known for a good amount of my life, from the start of middle school to the end of high school. I loved running for the discipline and sense of camaraderie I gained from it. It was my daily, temporary escape from the academic pressures I faced as a student with a rigorous schedule. Running taught me how to focus on the goal right in front of you, drowning out all other distractions. It also taught me the importance of balance in a team; individual success will take you nowhere near as far as the team’s success. It was here I learned the worth in taking the extra effort to develop your team in areas more than the required.

For the reasons (although one might say, excuses) that I got to college and had a rigorous courseload, changed my fitness goals, and grew apart from my running friends, I stopped running. Within my hiatus I changed my fundamental values, lost the ability to do any form of cardio, and changed the type of people I hung around in my main social circles. None of it was necessarily bad. It was just change. Change from a lifestyle I had lived on for so long. My personal balance had shifted, but I had no outlet to relieve my stress from the change of pace. It wasn’t until just a few weeks ago that I really started to miss the euphoric feeling of running. 

Then, I saw that my close friends in college started to pick up running. As they described their runs, it reminded me of how much every run made me enjoy the environment surrounding me. In a way, it was a reason why I chose to study what I am studying today. This, coupled with the realization that I couldn’t find an activity with the dopamine release that running gave, eventually inspired me to go back. So last week, I officially started my journey again, and from scratch.

A Mark Hinlo Classic Sidequest Run

Truth be told, I think about that saying a lot. About how we do a lot of things we love for the last time; that is the beauty and inevitability of time. We lose passion and drive for things we started, only for our energy to diverge away toward something bigger and more appealing to us. This is change, and to many of us learners out there, it builds character. I was reluctant to run again because I thought, since my context is different now than it was then, I wasn’t going to experience the same joy as before. This ended up being the opposite of the truth. My friends here are running, I have comparable academic stress to before, and I still have many issues in my life that I wish to be (a healthy amount) distracted from.

If I had any message for this blog, it wouldn’t necessarily be that having FOMO is a great phenomenon that causes you to run marathons. Instead, life takes you in many directions that cause you to lose routine and time for some of the things that once gave you joy. When life gives you an overwhelming feeling of imbalance, it might not be a bad idea to rekindle your relationship with something that gave you joy in the past, even though your present-day context isn’t exactly the same. The last time you did something doesn’t always have to be the last time you do it.