old trails

In an earlier post I wrote about a piece of software I wrote to play trail games. I made a mapping visualization tool the helps me track streets where I’ve run in neighbourhood. The point of it (as a game at least) is to try to run every street in a given neighbourhood, and having a tool that tracks and displays that makes the game more rewarding.

But the game has a side benefit: exploration.

I think there are two types of runners.

There are runners who find a route they like and just go. These same people are comfortable on indoor tracks and dreadmills, too. It’s not about anything but the run, or if it is, then I imagine it has something to do with comfort and familiarity and maybe even a dash of fear about getting lost.

Then there are runners who follow every path to its end just to see where it goes. I’m that guy. And it’s a personality I understand a bit better and can speak with more confidence about.

Everyone can be a bit of each, sure, but I think we lean towards one over the other.

Seeing the world and one’s local area as something to be explored is a mindset, though. It is a way of stepping out the front door and seeing something besides a familiar old trail: it’s seeing novelty in roads and paths that lead to places and stories beyond our everyday experience.

I sometimes look out the window when we’re driving down a busy urban street and look at the hundreds of houses we go past: each of those is a home to someone, painted with a story we’ll probably never know, and to realize that even stepping out of a familiar front door—I’ve lived at mine for twenty years—and noticing that there are roads and houses just blocks away that you’ve never noticed is an act of exploration.

It opens the mind.