Cshhh, cshhh, cshhh, cshhh, cshhh, cshhh, cshhh. My feet pound down the path.
The trees dapple the sunlight, accentuating the slight breeze in dancing shadows in my wake.
It is exhilarating, this freedom. Nothing but my own limitations hold me back.
When I go for a run, I can finally leave behind all the pestering thoughts clamoring for my attention and just be. Just be alive. Focus on the breathing and the evenness of the strides. The comforting inevitability of each footstep. Yup, there it is again. And again. And again. And again - As near to a constant rhythm as I can determine. Nothing else seems important.
So does that mean I am “running away”? Am I using this as a means to escape humanity for one blissful hour?

In response, a funny thought enters my head: Or am I running with humanity?
Are we all, to some extent, running? Trying to focus on ourselves as a means of ignoring the more disturbing parts of our surroundings?
No, that’s going too far.
But there is still something intriguing about the idea of us all being connected like that.

I begin thinking about running with other people, how often in a group people’s paces suddenly converge, and everyone’s feet hit the ground at the same time. Subconsciously. Instinctually. As if there’s some unseen force pulling them together...
Or how magical it is that groups of musicians can play together at the same tempo without an artificial beat, nothing forcing them together, yet the music coming out perfectly in sync.

When you think about it, life is full of beats, pulses, and rhythm: heartbeats, footsteps, the ticking of time, music… everything from the vibrating of individual atoms to the orbiting of planets! It all has a pulse.

And what if, what if all the pulses fit together! What if the exact rhythmic values are too subtle for us to make out so we hear them as random sounds but in fact they fit together to form a rhythm more complex than any other in existence, constantly changing yet never disconnected, never stopping? What if your heartbeat at this moment falls on the eighth upbeat of the thirty-second note divisions of my heartbeat? What if that song that person in New Orleans is playing happened to be exactly in time with my footsteps right now? What if you were chewing gum in time with the swaying trees? What if two people sitting in offices on opposite sides of the Earth are tapping their pencils against their desks at exactly the same time, and the guys sitting in two other offices are tapping out the swing beats in relation? What if the other divisions and connections are so small or complex that we can’t discern them?
It is an interesting thought.

But then: what could this idea explain?
One of the greatest commonalities between people is that we want to see an overarching scheme to life, right? We want there to be some purpose, some greater plan, some higher structure. Questions of How do I fit into this world, What is my purpose, What is universal, inevitably lead to the creation of things like religion or philosophy.

And we use circumstances that otherwise would be “impossible” to prove to ourselves and to others that we are correct in assuming the existence of a greater force. Coincidences that seem too crazy to be possible... patterns in both our personal and societal histories… miracles…
But what if these are all the product of our rhythms fitting together?
Maybe the people that you keep running into at different locations share a similar beat with you. Maybe the events that seem to be repeating themselves are actually representing a repetition in the overlap of a combination of human and environmental rhythms. Maybe everything that happens in life is the product of this seemingly random yet concrete rhythmic connection. An infinite web of cause-and-effect, composed of the vibrations we create in this world. In this universe.
A universal, all-inclusive rhythm.
Is this crazy?
Cshhh, cshhh, cshhh, cshhh, cshhh, cshhh, cshhh.