Atmospheric shift.
My observations on community.
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My girlfriend and I have set our sights on a half marathon. It’ll be my second one; if you’ve read Jeremy’s Journal for some time, you’ve suffered the multiple retellings of my first half marathon and the lessons I took away from it. Our training regimen is slowly heating up, and running is on the menu a few times a week. Though I have spoken of my previous running dedication and I certainly know the value of sticking to my fitness schedule come rain or shine, I’ve been struggling lately to roll out of bed and lace my shoes. My girlfriend, in contrast, is quite unstoppable. When she visited me at my parents’s home in South Africa she set off in the rain, undeterred by the ominous grey sky. I, very reasonably, told her that I would be staying at home in my slippers, thank you. Upon her return, and once refreshed with a warm shower, she teased me relentlessly. I was never one to let the rain stop me before, but I had become lazy enough that whatever excuse I could use, I would use. Whether it was her stoic mindset or her teasing, I found myself wanting the rain to visit us again, just so that I could go for a run. My girlfriend had pushed me to want to run in the rain, to show the kind of dedication she had shown in spite of unfavourable conditions. Murphy’s law: it hasn’t rained a drop since. Cape Town has been nothing but sunny skies. I am, however, in Berlin now and as we move into the winter months, rain, and a chance to prove my commitment, should be easier to come by.
Running looks very different in Berlin compared to my dozy neighbourhood in Cape Town. The preparation is essentially identical, it’s just as tough and frustrating to get out of my pyjamas and into my running gear (though I have a new pair of shoes, which makes the procedure just a touch more exciting). The big changes happen once I get out the door. On my inaugural run I made my way from the front door of my apartment building to a big road, which happens to be one of the central roads in the city, and ran alongside it until it was time to turn around. The physicality of running in the city is totally different to the suburbs; my eyes are always up, monitoring traffic, waiting at stoplights, trying my best to avoid getting hit by cyclists. There’s always noise in this part of the city: construction, hooting, e-bikes and -scooters, chatty smoke breaks, trains squealing to a halt. A few men were pruning the branches of large public trees in preparation for winter, and I could hear the woodchipper for the next block and a half. At home I run past quiet houses, a handful of cars on their way to work and the odd repairman. I’m not used to the noise, the rush, the hustle and bustle. I am used to people, though. When I go for a half an hour run in South Africa I’m bound to see at least a dozen people (even in my small neighbourhood), almost all of whom make eye contact and wave back at me as I offer a sweaty, red faced hello. Whether domestic or blue collar workers walking to their next job, couples out for their morning stroll, fellow sweaty cyclists and runners, even the odd driver, most of them are happy to smile and wave. Here and there I even get a compliment or a joke thrown my way. Not in Berlin. Here eye contact is a rarity, never mind a grin or a nod. Maybe I’m a suburb boy facing the reality of the city for the first time. Maybe if I were used to running in the heart of Cape Town or Pretoria, I wouldn’t be thrown. But even when I was training for that first half marathon in a bigger, busier city, South Africans of all kinds and colours were happy to greet me. I don’t see a thumbs up here and there as an inconvenience or interruption, the returned smiles even encourage me. On my first German run, I managed to get two or three returned smiles from the hundred or so people I encountered, and I think I’m prouder of that than I am of my run.
I’ve had the pleasure of living in the same house, neighbourhood, country for the last twenty three years. I’ve grown so accustomed to the ebb and flow of seasons that I can usually feel when rain is coming. In my little corner of the world, the rain is most often preceded by a warm front. That means if I can feel a warm, persistent wind when I stand on my front doorstep, it’ll probably rain the next day. There is some finesse to knowing the kind of wind and how rough it is, and how that’ll affect the incoming showers but it’s a pretty safe bet that rain is coming. Here’s a quick look at the science: the warmer air can carry more liquid, and it becomes saturated with water vapour (lots of teeny tiny droplets) as it moves over the land. When the air rises, the warm air cools down and can’t carry as much water vapour, and big drops form. As it begins raining, the smaller droplets that don’t fall seed neighbouring clouds and if they carry enough water, they begin to rain as well. That means it does’t only rain directly underneath the warm front, the rain covers a much larger area. All it takes to shower the city with rain and interrupt my running schedule is a tiny shift in the atmosphere. A few degrees for hundreds of litres of rain.
Maybe my expectations of Berliners are unfair. My girlfriend once put it to me this way: when you live in a big city, it’s normal to see hundreds, maybe even thousands of people every day. Imagine if you waved or smiled at every single person you saw—you’d never get anywhere. I can see the validity in this perspective. The two of us went to a concert earlier this week: we stood in line with hundreds of people, formed part of a crowd of roughly three thousand fans and then walked to the nearest train station with most of them. All in all, we probably saw around four thousand people from dawn to dusk. I didn’t wave at a single one. Somehow I feel differently about my run. The people I ran past mirrored their South African counterparts; I remember two seniors out for a brisk walk in the cold morning air, a young woman walking her dog, a few students on their way to class, three co-workers on a smoke break, a very busy mom escorting her toddler in a hurry. I don’t expect the people who are in a rush or who’ve got their hands full to stop their lives and greet me. But I only ran two and a half kilometres away from where I live, and the people I wanted to engage with were locals, other citizens who live and work where I do. I suppose I want to feel like I belong to a place and that I form part of a community. That’s why I don’t try to say hello to everyone I bump into on the train—we’re all on our way somewhere, it isn’t necessarily the place to build community. I also don’t expect to be invited into the community of a place I visit for an hour or two, that isn’t a reasonable expectation either. I think I need an invite into my local community, though. Especially having moved to Berlin, knowing I’ll be here for the next year at least, I want to be a part of my neighbourhood. I want those smiles and waves.
My plan, and my hope, is to be a warm front. I will continue to make eye contact with everyone who is willing when I go for a run; continue to offer a smile, however sweaty and red-faced it may be. As tenacious as my girlfriend is with her running, I will stoically represent the community that I want to see. I know that smiling at strangers may seem nuts, that it may seem like a minuscule change in atmosphere. But a tiny change in atmosphere brings the rain. Perhaps, one day, it’ll pour.
I buried the lead a little, I’m living in Berlin now! Keep reading to go on this adventure with me. If this journal resonated with you, please send it to someone you love.