When i watched Forrest Gump for the first time, I was clearly amazed by the movie. There were so many inspirational parts in the movie that it became in many ways an important part of my life. One of the sequences in the movie had Forrest a young confused man take to running non stop across the continent of North America. In the movie the run is shown under the light of a search for spirituality & answers.

Ever since i watched Forrest Gump I have always wondered on the rewards of simply running away into the distance. I always looked at it and was amazed at this man’s ability to run into the wilderness without thinking twice about what the next turn had in store.

Each one of us in our lives is always taught to play it safe and make sure of decisions we make. We spend hours checking and double checking decisions that we expect to change our lives. We are all wary of what we might face in the next turn.

There is a scene in Gattaca where Ethan Hawke‘s character challenges his genetically perfect brother to a swimming race. The target is to swim as far into the ocean as possible and the first one that turns back loses.

That scene is one of the most important ones in the movie, in the race Ethan beats his brother and when the eventually reach back on shore, his brother asks him how he was able to do it. Ethan simply says “You wanna know how I did it? This is how I did it… I never saved anything for the swim back.”

It speaks volumes for the character when we realize that for him it was far more important to prove to his brother that he was no lesser than him, even more than his own life.

In the movie Fight Club, Tyler Durden the man that creates Fight Club quotes: “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.” The Lack of hope is what can set a man truly free…

For me, Tyler struck the right chord with what he said. For me, the ability to push to the limit and beyond it and still keep pushing is something extremly inspirational.

So why am I talking about all this… Last week for a change I broke a routine I have been following wrt running for a long time. When ever I run I already have my route planned in my mind, I normally do a single lap around a few roads in my neighborhood but to a large extent I simply run a predefined path.

Last week, for some reason I decided to take another route coz I simply felt like it… I kept running without thinking about heading back towards home… Every step I took I felt the coolness of the early morning breeze, watched the stirring of the early morning risers who had ventured out from their homes and breathed deeply the fresh morning air…

For those few minutes I knew what it felt to be free… Its incredibly hard to put into words what that feeling is like but for sure I had a sense of what it was that inspired those people…

Sometimes there are moments in life when you know, without a doubt that this is an extremely rare and important moment of your life… that run in the morning was one…