Previously, I tend to take the ‘backwoods’ track, along the road that ran behind the lake, going up the hills and down to the river, or taking a bend to the marketplace parking lot, usually deserted this late in the day. Reason: less traffic, cleaner air. More important reason: less people, less self-consciousness. But choosing those paths isn’t a very good strategy, especially at these extremely early stages of building a workout lifestyle. They go uphill, then downhill, then uphill again, and in less than five minutes of climbing those upslanting roads I would be virtually blue in the face. No, not good at all. I can walk in these roads no problem, but I wouldn’t be able to maintain a sustainable jogging pace.
So I tried to take the path of least resistance – the flat tracks around the lake, where pretty much everybody were sharing the space.
I was very aware of my surroundings, especially the people around me, as I started my jog. While realising the absurdity of it, initially I couldn’t take my mind off the expectation that all these people – fellow joggers, runners, those who are ambling along the lake, the ones with family, the ones hanging around simply taking the surroundings – are observing me, and noticing how silly I looked, shaking my booty, puffing and huffing, in the least classy way possible. A form of delusion of grandeur, common to everyone including the most innocent and humble of us, thinking that we are so important that other people will bother to notice our presence and make commentaries upon it.
I carried on, trying to will away the unreasonable self-consciousness. I focused on the sweet evening air, occasionally tinged with exhaust smoke or smoke from open burnings in people’s yards. I focused on the greens and browns of the lake, of the trees, the grass, and the stones that line the jogging track. I focused on my breathing, in and out, in and out, as deep as I could draw it, bringing energy and renewed vigor with each lungful.
Then, the inhibitions, the self-consciousness, started to drain away. People are unique – every single one of them have something worth staring, and taken as a collective, the individual uniqueness blend and cancel each other out. If everyone has a weirdness in one way or another, then no one is the weird one. A beautiful middle-aged lady jogged with an elderly man I presumed to be her husband, and she’s decked….
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SEPARUH TERANG 