My secret hiding place

            When I was little, I loved the idea of a secret hiding place.  A place you could sneak into and disappear from the rest of the world, just for a little while.  A place you could just be with yourself, with your own thoughts, on your own time.  My favorite book was The Secret Garden.  The idea of having an entire garden just to yourself…it seemed wonderful to me.

            Maybe my fascination with solitude was derived from my lack of it.  I lived in a busy home.  In my elementary years, my family lived in a house in Richmond, VA.  I have 3 siblings—2 younger brothers and an older sister.  My sister and I shared a room until I was in late elementary school.  Both my parents, still happily married as they always have been, 2 cats, and a dog also lived in our home.  There were often more than just us 4 children.  We all had neighborhood friends that came and went from our home in waves throughout the day.

My little brother recently visited our VA home
and took this picture.  It certainly doesn't look
the same as it does in my memory, but the
castle-like quality is unmistakable.

            Sometimes, I just wanted to be alone.  I had a number of secret hiding places.  As a kid, I thought our house in Virginia looked like a miniature castle.  It was offset on our property with a yard on one side and a small, narrow passageway between the house and the privacy fence on the other side.  The passageway was just wide enough to fit one person and was covered by overhanging trees and bushes.  In the castle-like theme, or family took to calling this the Secret Passageway.  There was also a neighbor up the street who had perfectly trimmed hedges.  In one spot they cupped back into the yard right near the garage.  If you crouched down behind them, you could hear everyone passing on the street while hidden from the house itself.  I often brought a notebook and a pen there with me after “running away.”  I usually got worried and made it back home before anyone realized I was gone.  There was also a large tree with branches perfect for climbing in our yard.  I would climb as high as I could, usually as high as the roof of our 2 story home, and sit there for what felt to me like hours (in kid time, who knows how long this was).  I could look down onto the yard and watch everything happening.  I could spy on my sister and her boyfriend.  Or on my brothers and their mischievous friends getting into trouble.  I liked to watch the world from far away, to take it all in on my own terms, in my own time.

            As I grew older, I still relished my alone time.  Once I had my own room, I liked shutting the door and just having my own space.  In high school, I’d wallow in my despair behind closed doors—I even remember a few times not only shutting myself away in my bedroom, but I’d curl up inside my closet and close the door.  In college, I couldn’t stand the lack of privacy in dorms and moved out of them as soon as possible.  This isn’t to say that I always wanted to be alone, just that I relished my solitude every once in a while.

            In the final years in NYC, I felt as though I had too much solitude.  I had too much time to think, to turn thoughts over and over in my brain until they weren’t thoughts anymore but screaming cries of frustration instead.  I wanted to something to occupy my thinking time, to get me focused on something else.  And so Lucy appeared.  And so running took root.  Focusing on training Lucy, navigating the dog park social world, teaching myself to run, becoming a healthy person—all these things allowed me to take brief reprieves from my own mind.

But after I moved to Seattle, things changed.  I began branching out of my introverted self, exploring the extrovert that I’d hidden away for so long.  My time was occupied, I had things to do.  Suddenly, I found that running was no longer my distraction from solitude but my only source of solitude.  In Seattle, my world flipped upsidedown—no longer did I worry about having too much lonely time.  I worried about having too little.  And so, as it has proved to do a few times since, my running transformed itself to suit my needs.  Instead of being a distraction, running became a release.  It became my only time to stop and think about me, to give my thoughts the simmering time they needed.  Lucy and I would hit the streets of Magnolia, and suddenly my mind was a spinning wheel.  I’d work through all the events of the day, the worries that still nagged from previous days, all the thoughts that I didn’t have time to think otherwise.

This is one of the things I love about running.  Running will be whatever you need it to be.  Running will be a life-changer.  Or it will be the rock that has steadies you through moments of turbulent life.  Running will be your solitude.  Or it will be your distraction from solitude.  Running will be your time.  Or it will be the time you give to others.  Running will be your exercise, your stress relief, your calming agent, or your energizer.  Running is more versatile than I could have ever imagined when I chose to take that first step out the door.

During my first year in Seattle, I needed running to be my secret hiding place.  I needed it to be a place I could run away to when things got too crazy, too overwhelming.  I needed it to be my fount of sanity.  And, reliably, it was.  Most of the time, running isn’t a hiding place for me anymore, but sometimes when days get tough and life gets dizzying, I can choose to find that secret hiding place again and tuck myself away for a bit to find comfort in its solitude.