“…face it with no agenda, only appreciation”
You can live by your agenda book, or you can live life flying by the seat of your pants, so to speak, but for me, the key is strike the perfect balance.
In the spirit of marathon planning, I worked my whole calendar this week. I wanted to see all my good intentions in one place, and if it would be physically possible to do everything in 72 hours, + the miles I now owe myself. So I mapped out the details. I started using the Train Time app. I kept super busy. It was a bit different for me, I’m not necessarily the planning type, I love to be lucky. I intentionally don’t plan things sometimes to leave plenty of room for magic things to happen. And they do! So much! But I have noticed since kind of getting back into a routine, that this attitude can leave me out of sync with the world I live in. The trains do run on a schedule, I work on a schedule, my friends keep various semblance of a schedule, and if I reject the concept wholesale I must deal with the consequences.
The main consequence of not having any plan at all is the feeling that I am out of sync with the rest of the world on a weekend. Which is pretty usual for me, maybe also because I have zero chill and unlimited energy for having fun. My favorite weekend of all of college is always remembered as the “horse show/ halloween/ half marathon” weekend, as an adult, New York to Barcelona in 72 hours is up there. Both of these definitely involved a level of planning, but also bit of “je ne sais quoi”, despite being laid out plans, they certainly were left a lot of room for things to go wrong and for magic to happen. So, this weekend, I think I made the same type of plans in miniature - a schedule of the things I want to do, except the things I want to do are run, and look art and surf…
I feel like there was an immediate benefit. Something about Fridays always makes me sad, but making a calendar for the weekend I realized that I do have a lot of things to be excited for, even if it wasn’t headed to JFK! I honored my little Friday ritual of nail-painting and Soho, even if it was a little less spontaneous than the week before. I had plans for the next morning, I had plans for the next afternoon. Friday on my training schedule is a rest day, Saturday is a 5-mile run, Sunday is 8 miles, and Monday is cross-training. But since my plan is stretched out 6 weeks, I have room to mess this all up. So I opted to do the last snake run of the year. Snake Run is an amazing project where you meet up to run with a group that rushes the streets of Chelsea and stops at 5-6 different art galleries and installations. Every single one smelled like Le Labo Santal 33 and I know it wasn’t us, a group where my running app interrupting a docent’s explanation of the first post-minimalist to work in neon was met with more knowing smiles than condescension…
And it was good for my imagination to take everything in! Honestly, sometimes, the art I see in galleries feels just as inaccessible as any other new endeavor- reading a book in French or trying to learn a new computer program. I feel my brain straining to make connections that just aren’t there yet. But at the same time, it feels completely validating, to see the effort and elevation that goes into an exhibit. The massive canvases, the texts, the perfect gallery walls, all there on the strength of an artist, one person, who had something to say.
I also connected a lot with a little anecdote about Keith Sonnier at the Kasmin gallery. He titles one series “Ba-o-Ba” after a patois name of a fishing boat he encountered in New Orleans. The word means something like “light bath”, how the fisherman would describe being on the boat at night when the moonlight is reflected on the water.
I guess because I was surfing the next day, surrounded by the sparse light of the winter sky as it reflected off the water (something I really appreciate when I’m not catching a lot of waves with my weakling arms clad in 5mm), I loved this anecdote. And I’m also pretty into my own collection of little phrases and ideas I find, on the side of boats and the unexpectedly poetic words of strangers, a kind of art I connect with just as much as anything I find in a gallery, so it was pretty cool to learn those moments are as special as I hold them to be - the origin story of real art!
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If you’re reading this please consider donating to my london marathon fundraiser for VICTA UK ❤️
https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/SaraMorano
