One of the reasons I don't listen to music on my runs

I spent almost a quarter of my waking hours today on a long run. A couple of miles in, I passed a farmer spreading manure. (I was to later pass 4 more farmers doing the same thing. Today was the day, apparently). I imagined him shaking his head at what was essentially a pointless expenditure of effort on my part, while he spent his day toiling from dawn to dusk to accomplish necessary tasks, on a Sunday. It made me reflect on how strange the gap is between people's needs. I need to spend a good chunk of my free time running in order not to have a heart attack at 50-something because I spend the bulk of my time with my ass slowly conforming to the shape of an office chair, while there are serious needs for physical labor in the world- 2.4 miles from my house, to be exact. Why isn't there an easy way for my need for physical work to get matched up with an actual job that needs to get done? There are migrants coming to our country to perform physical labor that no American wants to do- like picking New York State's apple crop every year- while Americans are dying way too young because we are way too sedentary. Why the imbalance?

All of nature, apart from human beings, exists in balance, each life and force flowing into the need of another part. The intricate balance of predator and prey; animals and plants figuring in their roles and producers, consumers, and decomposers; water continuing in its cycle through the air and back to earth-- all matter dissolves and reconstitutes itself continually in a dizzying dance through being and non-being. As humans, the matter of which we are composed is a part of all of those cycles, and we feel our kinship with it. But we stand apart in that we are driven by some other need which makes us resist all of those never-ending cycles. We are constantly looking for a break in one of those chains to find our freedom. But what are we really resisting, and why are we resisting it?

The strange mismatch of human beings' needs seems to stem from this need we all have to be out of step with nature. I read a crazy article last year about an Indian entrepreneur who figured out a way to collect the thrown out food of restaurants and distribute it to India's starving population. Here was a guy who just figured out how to match up people's mismatched needs- on the one hand there's a class of people with so much money that they continually waste food, and on the other hand there is a huge population of people literally starving and which could live on the waste of the upper classes. What a simple and beautiful idea to connect those people so that they can share.

I still don't know what it is in human nature that compels these excesses that remove us from the cycle of life and death. But it is something fundamental and flawed and strange. And there are some genius souls who can see their way clear to mending the rent this tears in the social fabric. And they feed millions of hungry.