henryzhang:

I joined the cross-country team for a season in my sophomore year, running laps around the park behind the school in the brittle chill of the New Jersey autumn. As a freshman and as a senior at Columbia, I somehow managed to wake up early enough on a Friday for the President Bollinger’s Annual 5K Fun Run in Riverside Park. The longest race I’ve run so far is the Montclair YMCA 10K. In the town where Stephen Colbert lives, people lined the streets and filled the parks, standing and sitting in lawn chairs, holding posters and cheering for their family members, for their friends, and for complete strangers.

Although it is a race and there are winners, the marathon is not so much about competition as it is about community. It doesn’t matter if you’re the first person to cross the finish line or if you cross the finish line three hours later - people will cheer you on all the way from start to finish. It’s not a race where you run against others, but a race where you run for yourself. It raises money for charity. It brings folks together. It is a celebration of physical stamina and, more so, of the human spirit.

I have immense admiration for marathons and marathon runners. On my bucket list, running the New York marathon is up there with reaching the summit of Mount Everest and opening a mushroom-themed restaurant called Chanterelle. So when the explosions ripped through the innocent crowds at the Boston Marathon on Monday, it felt was if my personal dreams had been targeted as well. I felt angry - so angry - and shocked, confused, frustrated.

Andrew Cohen is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice of the New York University Law School. He spent seven years of his life in Boston, where he obtained his bachelor’s and graduate degrees from Boston University. In “You May Leave Boston, But Boston Never Leaves You”, Cohen reminded me about the strength of a community - a community that is more expansive, more powerful, and more enduring than any senseless destruction:

Each year, the city absorbs into its colleges and universities tens of thousands of teenagers, 18-year-olds, from every corner of the world, each of whom is seeking, in one way or another, to learn something and to become whatever it is they are destined to become. The boy from Arizona, there on a scholarship, who has never before seen snow. The girl from Montana, who’s never seen anything but Big Sky. The lucky son of diplomats. They all arrive in late summer to a city used to showing children what it means, and what it takes, to live in a great American metropolis. No other city in the nation does this as well.

And, every year, in a cycle renewed for hundreds of years, the city disgorges tens of thousands of college graduates into the world. This means that there are millions of men and women wandering around America today who spent some of the best years of their lives in and around Boston, walking some of the very streets splattered with blood yesterday in the wake of the Marathon bombings. Boston is where those students like me came of age. It’s where we met our spouses or significant others. It’s where we learned our craft. It’s where we connected with the friends and mentors we would have for the rest of our lives. Even if we can’t say we are “from” Boston we surely confirm when asked that we are “of” Boston. It remains in our blood.

Boston’s enormous extended family didn’t have to be on or near Boylston Street Monday to appreciate how glorious Patriots’ Day can be: the joy of springtime after the brutal New England winter; the early Sox game; the crowded Green Line; the early-opening bars; and the runners and their families, coming in toward the City, coming in toward the finish line. The parties on the balconies in the apartments along Beacon Street. The cheering for the men and women who had run so far for so long just for the privilege of running on this day. Indeed, even to those who never run, Marathon Day meant the end of our own personal marathons— the looming end of the school year, the looming end of our college careers, the end of our youth.

No bombing can ever take away what Boston means to the men and women whose lives have been shaped by it over the generations. No tragedy can ever take away Patriots’ Day, or the Marathon, or the city’s pride and relief in having made it to another spring. For now, for today, perhaps it is enough to merely remind our friends and family there in the Hub that we are with them, that we never really left no matter how far away we may be, and that we’ll be with them again next year, in sorrow and in joy.

(Source : aic-edu)