A friend just wrote me in full meltdown mode because she’s been working the 4:00pm to 2:00am hospital shift for two weeks straight. Of all the daily rituals such a schedule might disturb — sleep and regular meals among them — the one she’s most upset about is missing her running group.

She recently moved to a new town for this job (apparently the hospital is unswayed by her sweet, lost, newbie air and wants her in charge of everything, all the time), and the running group has become her way of being among people without having to act like she’s trying to be among people. We’ve all moved to a new place and at least thought about meeting people at the local pub or coffee shop, but what are you doing there but lurking and drinking and passively hoping someone interesting will approach, and aware the whole time that if someone does approach it will be creepy, so what do you even want, poor thing, shaking with caffeine and desperate to pee but afraid of leaving your laptop with one of these strangers? No, it’s much better to join a running group. First of all, you’re running! Zoom! (For my friend, it really is zoom! For me, more like, zuh, zuh, zuh, oom? But this is not about my fitness.) Anyway, you’re running, your feet are moving, you’re going places, and whether these other people in shorts are going anywhere is up to them. It’s the opposite of waiting for something to happen to you.

And here I think I arrive at my point. For most of my life I’ve been convinced that the only things really worth much were the things other people, or collections of people, as in institutions, conferred on you. You worked, and waited, and looked serene, and felt virtuous, if a little anxious, and eventually someone came by with a wreath and put it on your head. Status wreath! To pursue something in an active way, to appear to want it, was totally embarrassing. This isn’t to say I didn’t believe you should be ambitious, but I did think ambition was something you dealt with on your own, quietly, as you would a love of cookies.

Ok, I want this thing, and I may even get if for myself, because it’s really not so bad, but it’s nothing to shout about, either, and maybe I’ll even eat the cookie out of the little opaque paper bag, so maybe it looks like an oatcake.

All this, of course, suggests a pathetic, if generic, preoccupation with what other people observe about us. Do I really think someone is looking at my bag from the coffee shop and caring what’s in it? You – oat eater! Capital! Well played! I guess I do imagine people care, except that imagines a whole Being John Malkovich scenario, with frown-faced, knitting-navel-to-spine-excellent-posture-having, cookie-deploring ME everywhere.

But I digress! What I’ve discovered is how liberating and terrifying it is to realize that no one cares about what happens with your cookie or your career or your dog or that gray hair sticking straight up from the middle of your part as much as you do, which mean, yes, you have to pick up the phone. You have to find out what’s up, and suggest things, and offer to do things, and be an instigator, not just a responder, however lovely and nuanced and carefully calibrated your response, however perfectly you got it. Because you also have to go get it. Baby, you have to set the world on fire. Baby, you have to go running.