500 Words a Week - The Romantics Never Die
On Saturday mornings here in London, I like to go on a long run. Actually, like might be the wrong word, I make myself go on a long run as I prepare for a new endeavour. About 4 km into the usual route I travel, there’s a bit of graffiti on one of the pavement stones. In the usual rush of central London with swarms of people darting to and from work, or tourists flocking between the many destinations to see, I imagine these words are often stepped over without a second glance.
But in the quiet of a weekend morning, the Monday to Friday workers sleeping in, trading their work suits for pyjama suits, the city takes on a different quality. It becomes still. Peaceful. In this stillness, you begin to notice things you normally wouldn’t. You see some of the hidden intricacies on the buildings around, that you normally miss as you are attempting to dodge the onslaught of human bodies attempting to get to their intended destinations. With each individual person believing their journey is the most important and questioning why are there so many slow people about. London city streets you could barely squeeze through during the week, become pleasant streets to run down during the weekend early mornings. The city feels asleep.
It’s in this quiet that I first noticed the words, written plainly on the path:
“The Romantics Never Die.”
As I’m on a long run, I usually have time to my thoughts, and over the course of my recent long run, this idea written on the path kept returning to me.
I’m not sure on the true, formal definition of a romantic but what comes to mind is the old phrase that people will always remember how you made them feel. And how potentially this little aspect that we can control in the present can far outlive us. For maybe, if we can attempt to make the souls we encounter along the way feel something within, safe, seen, understood and loved, they might carry that feeling with them. They might offer it to someone else. Who passes it to another, and another. And long after we are gone, this feeling that we had hoped to pass along still remains.
We often find that when we remember loved ones who have passed, what lingers is not always what they said or did, but how they made us feel. That warmth, that light, that steadiness they offered us. In that way, a part of them remains with us. And when we pass that same feeling on, perhaps to someone they never even met, their presence continues to ripple outward. In this way, their spirit lives on through the way we choose to live and love.
Maybe that’s what it means to be a romantic, to believe that love, connection, and feeling doesn’t end with us. That how we choose to act and make people feel has reverberations after we are gone.
