I’m training for a race right now and as I’ve increased my mileage I’ve started to 1. feel my age and 2. recognize that running four or five times a month for the past three years is somewhat paltry maintenance. My running-genius friend thinks I may still be able to get in race shape by May, but some days I have not shared his confidence.

At the end of an unseasonably warm February, today’s miles were sunny and it was about 45°F, but the wind was strong. One stretch of my route cut through a patch of woods, then opened up on a road next to a river. As I left the shelter of the trees and turned onto the sidewalk, a warmish tailwind nudged me forward for a half-mile or so, and I thanked the natural universe for my good fortune. I turned another corner, and was on my own again. Then I turned another corner, and you can likely guess what happened now that I was running counter-parallel to that lovely stretch of good fortune.

I’m quite positive the wind was twice as strong and a good bit colder than it had been when it was behind me. Every step I too was met with a grand conspiracy to impede my personal progress and this was almost certainly some form of karmic punishment for a past grievance.

That’s a little hyperbolic but thoughts of this nature actually surfaced in my brain.

Then the thing I realized is: it’s just wind. Point of fact, it hadn’t even changed. I had changed direction. In one context that wind had been a gift and in the other I understood it as my enemy. This was **my** pre-planned route, and I didn’t want to change it ‘cause my running-genius friend gave me a plan and I was going to stick to it.

At the time, the lesson I took from this was not that running into a headwind is actually better training than running with a tailwind, even though I realize that now as I’m writing this. The lesson that came to me in the moment was that the wind is not actually interested in me at all, because it’s wind. My decisions put me in the wind, and amazingly, despite the mild discomfort of the moment, all that actually happened was I ran a little slower and my legs burned a little more.

For the past few years, my job, and by extension the rest of my life (my own doing, admittedly), have felt like running into a headwind. Please let me recognize of the privilege I have been given, which is the chance to do meaningful work. But it’s also pretty hard and sometimes pretty sad.

To some degree, I think I’ve been giving the wind way too much significance. I’m starting to recognize that the wind isn’t actually pointed at me. I’m just standing in it. More precisely, I put myself in it.

Medicine is a windy place. Sometimes there’s a tailwind, and it’s the most amazing job in the world. It just so happens that in my case, the first few years in a new job, inheriting a busy practice in a two-doctor group and losing access to the experience of twenty other oncologists and hematologists in the same building has felt like running straight into a gale.

But it’s not a tornado. It’s survivable, and it’s not even personal. It’s just the way the wind is blowing right now.