Why Are You Running Today?
At Black Sheep, we love ideas: New ideas. Bold ideas. Crazy ideas. Audacious ideas. And we like to surround ourselves with people who help generate these ideas. People with ideas that shift a perspective. Ideas that accelerate impact. Ideas that ask you to look at the world in a different way. Ideas that transform. Ideas that rally people together.
But ideas don’t always come to us when we’d like them to. We have to think on them. Sleep on them. Mull them over. When ideas do come to us, they often times come to us in the most unexpected ways. We’ve had lightbulb moments in the grocery store. We’ve had shower thoughts as we’re rinsing out our shampoo. And we’ve had flashes of brilliance as we’re running.
Running is when a lot of ideas come to us. When we’re outside of the office, lost in thought, mid-stride. When our guards are down and our minds are wandering, traipsing through the intricacies of our lives, rattling off the to-dos and daydreaming of possibilities.
In The Runners, a short film directed by Matan Rochlitz and Ivo Gormley and produced by Banyak Films, people on their routine runs are randomly chosen and asked questions that elicit heartfelt and painfully honest responses. People with their head down, lost in thought are suddenly quizzed on brutally personal and probing questions of the heart. Positive questions that evoke the human side of us, the oftentimes guarded side of us. With each interview beginning with the simple question, “Why are you running today?” this film offers a brief glimpse into the inner workings of a stranger’s mind—a glimmer of insight into the personal perspectives of complete strangers—to remind us that we all have our own thoughts, our own ideas, our own ways of looking at the world “and with nothing but our own two legs moving us, we begin to get a vague, tingling sense of who, or what, we really are.”
Thinking through the questions Rochlitz and Gormley asked the runners, ask yourself these questions:
What’s the most important thing that has happened to you?
Who’s your favorite person in the world?
What do you want to do with your life?
Are you in love?
Have you ever been in love?
And if you don’t know the answers, maybe you should put your running shoes on.