Amazing people

Posted on April 25, 2018. Filed under: Uncategorized |

Yesterday I went for a run on the west side highway with my wife Olivia. For those of you who don’t live in New York, the running path along the west side highway is on the Hudson River and there’s a beautiful park that goes from the tip of manhattan up to the George Washington Bridge. I’d guess hundreds of thousands of people run or walk or cycle there everyday.

As we were making our way south on yesterday’s run, a cyclist started riding alongside us as we ran, and he looked over to my wife and said “you are an amazing person.” She was taken back for a moment, and then we realized he had been riding behind us for a while and then it made sense. You see, when we run along the river, my wife will break off from our pace whenever she sees a piece of plastic or an empty water bottle…she’ll swoop down and pick up someone else’s garbage and run with it until we pass a trash can where she disposes of it and catches back up with me.

Olivia is a student of sustainability. She cares deeply about the health of our environment, and the thought of more plastic washing into the ocean is just too much for her to stomach…so she cleans it up…every time…without hesitation. Sometimes I wonder why I don’t help her…the answer is partly because my vision isn’t as good as hers, so she always spots the plastic first and zips off to get it, and partly it’s because while she is focussed on the well being of the planet and all beings that inhabit it, I’m in my head, thinking about whatever is going on in my life or my work…and I just am not conscious of it until she disappears from my side and reappears with someone else’s crumpled starbucks cup in her hand.

My wife is selfless. I interact with amazing people all day long. We all revere the people who found Ethereum or run Amazon as incredible…unique…one of one type people…but amazing comes in many forms…and I agree with the cyclist…my wife is unusual and unique and absolutely an amazing person. Somewhere along the way Olivia’s selflessness became so routine that I normalized it…that’s just who she is…but this unusual interaction with the cyclist on the path reminded me just how unusual and one of one and incredible she is. I guess you could say I’m married to the Jeff Bezos of selflessness…and I’m pretty proud of that 🙂