Emily Falk

And I biked up to the path that takes me to the route along the river, which is really beautiful.

So pretty soon I was on this jogging path, but I was just flying past the joggers and the light was reflecting off of the Schuylkill River.

And I just felt amazing.

Like I went...

All the way from where I live in West Philadelphia over to where she lives near the art museum in this kind of state of feeling like this is exactly where I want to be right now.

Like I'm out on this beautiful fall afternoon and having that time outside, having that me time felt really good.

Exactly.

I think that, you know, the more places in our life where we can find moments of joy, moments of connection, moments of happiness, like I think we should take them where we can get them.

I think one thing that we can do is think about how the goals that we have or the things that we want to do, but that we might not necessarily immediately connect with our sense of who we are, could be connected to strengths we already have or things that we're already doing.

So one thing that happened for me was, you know, I go for jogs mostly to de-stress, to blow off some steam.

And I have two siblings who are much more serious runners.

And one day my brother was pitching me on the idea that if I did some targeted workouts that I could get faster.

And initially I sort of wondered, like, why would I care about getting faster in the first place?

Like growing up, I was, you know, thought of myself probably more like as a nerd than as a jock.

And it wasn't immediately part of my identity to think of myself as a runner in that way.

And my brother framed it a different way.

He said, you know, academics often make really good runners because academics are good at planning.

Academics are good at working hard on things that, you know, have some payoff in the long term.

And so that shifted it from something where, you know, doing these harder workouts to get faster would just be to do it to something that I already had the skills, the disposition to do.

He also added another social reward, which was that if I got faster, I could run with my brother and sister and hear the gossip, which of course is very motivating for me.