Spiritual or Religious? - I Run

The first answer that comes to my mind when people ask me if I am religious/spiritual is “I run”. I am barely religious even though I love to listen to the Vedas sometimes, I don’t think I am really spiritual either. But I communicate with God when I run and that much I know. He loves me when I run and we really have a conversation going. This is precisely the reason why I get pissed off when I get injured. I feel like something is stopping me from having a conversation and I need to fight it and re-start running again. I also hate it when I do 2-3 km runs mainly because my conversation is cut short.

From a scale of 1-10, 1 representing low and 10 high, I rate the importance of running in my life to be 10. I have attempted to learn new things like dance, yoga etc but they don’t do it for me.

We had a conversation yesterday if we made the right decision by coming back from the States last night. The truth is that then we had 2 options. Either we could fake our resumes and get a job through some desi consultant or just hold your identity, come back and work in India. We chose to come back. Other factors that influenced the decision was watching tsunami with a hangover and a feeling of helplessness, not being home in 3 years, an obscure course in environmental economics/human wildlife conflicts etc. If I were to do it all over again, I might change a few things in those 3 years, focus on learning to run (rather than play basketball), and party much lesser and spend a few more years in the States before I got here. The downside of that would be that if I did not return then, I would have never returned which would not be a bad deal if you clearly know what you wanted. Ofcourse, there are things that I miss about the States – athletics, access to great sports infrastructure, seeing tons of folks running on the street at all points of time, plenty of events and ofcourse, tons of great friends.