When I was a teenager, I loved skiing. I loved the freedom, the speed and the adrenaline of it. Once, I had this dream in which all the joys of skiing turned into a nightmare: It was Word War 3 and my family and I went skiing. We were allowed to ski but we couldn’t make any turns. Whoever tried to make a turn to slow down or to stop would get shot. It was a steep and bumpy slope and I ended up going so fast I was almost flying. I’ve been thinking of that nightmare every time I’ve gone out for a run. I love running because it gives me a sense of freedom of movement and thought. I’ve been enjoying the empty park and roads but part of me is terrified when I see the police in the park telling people what type of activities are allowed. My nightmare is turning into an idea for a dystopian story in which restrictions get out of hand and people can only go out to do exercise and get shot if they do anything other than that… I imagine that I have to train myself to be able to run forever to overcome the restrictions and be free … until I run out of breath… It’s quite dark, I know, but this isolation makes me think of the fragility of freedom – especially now that we have to give it up. My nightmare is that the activity I love becomes the only thing I can do… Or that I start loving the restrictions… In the beginning of the pandemic, I thought I knew what the right and wrong behaviors were but seeing too much of the right makes me miss the wrong. So at least I started running on roads just to diversify the ways we run should everything we do become “the new normal”The spectre of totalitarianism is haunting me. It seems to be creeping out from behind my memory of the Iron Curtain…#freedom#quarantine#pandemic#totalitarianism#running#dystopia