My capstone experience in Human-Centered Design at Dartmouth College was a class called the “Senior Design Challenge,” a two-term experiment in problem solving that involved sixteen students split into four teams of four all managed by one incredible professor named Eugene. It was the kind of class where you showed up not necessarily to learn but to demonstrate you had learned something during the time in between classes.

For our project, my team partnered with the Weight and Wellness Center at the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center to improve the patient experience and reduce program attrition, which, conventional wisdom held, was driven in part by how far patients had to travel: Because of the paucity of medical care in rural New England, many patients had to drive an hour or more to come to the hospital for their scheduled appointments.

My teammates and I set about interviewing hospital staff, who were keen on the promise of telemedicine, and patients, who just wanted to live healthier lives. I’ll spare you the details of the entirety of the process. The important part is that, about half-way through our twenty week timeline, we organized a co-creation workshop to design our way forward with patients. It was a fun experience for everyone involved. We came up with some fairly wild ideas. But I came away from it feeling as though the most promising solution to improve the patient experience and reduce program attrition wasn’t anything we had articulated in the workshop. It was the workshop. What patients really liked, what really made the experience worthwhile to them, was being in one room, together, doing something meaningful.

Up until that point, I had thought of the hour-long drive that most patients made as a burden we ought to remove. I had thought of being far away from the hospital as correlative with failure, that distance was the primary driver of attrition. But, as one patient, a mid-50s widower who lived alone in rural Vermont, told us: visiting the hospital was the bright spot of her week. It didn’t matter that she had to drive an hour each way. Distance was different from and preferable to disconnection.

To this day, I have thought about the difference between distance and disconnection. Recently, I have also been thinking about bright spots, moments of happiness that punctuate otherwise difficult times.

A teammate of mine arranging sticky notes during the co-creation workshop.

II.

When it comes to our own happiness, there’s a lot we get wrong. For one thing, we tend to think that major life events will have a lasting, significant impact on our happiness, when in fact the research points to the contrary. Buying a new car, house or even getting married tend only to increase our levels of perceived happiness for about sixth months to a year. One of the leading theories as to why is called “hedonic adaption,” or the “hedonic treadmill,” the idea that humans quickly return to a relatively stable baseline level of happiness despite major positive or negative life events.

At first blush, that may should disheartening. But hedonic adaption isn’t all bad. For one thing, the premise that we return to a baseline level of happiness despite major positive or negative life events is deeply reassuring. It means we are more resilient that we think. Furthermore, just because we return to a baseline level of happiness after major life events does not mean we can’t increase our levels of happiness. It just means we’ll have a hard time doing it through major life events.

In a large part, this is because happiness isn’t a permanent state. It’s something that needs consistent care and attention, similar to eating well. A single healthy meal will not sustain you indefinitely, nor will a single purchase or experience. To be happier, we should focus less on the intensity of our happy moments and more on the frequency, because frequent moments of happiness, in aggregate, do tend to make us happier over time (Velasco-Matus et al., 2016).

Learning this led me to a few conclusions about bright spots: you want to have a lot of them, you want to have them consistently, and you want to be on the look out for them so that you don’t miss the small ones. Because it doesn’t matter if the bright spot is big or small. As far as your happiness is concerned, you just need to notice it.

Dumbarton Oaks Part 1 — A visual bright spot: Dumbarton Oaks

III.

Often in the Senior Design Challenge, we would begin class with an improv exercise and end it with a reflection. One of our usual concluding exercises involved sitting on the floor in a circle with a ball of yarn. The person with the yarn would share one thing they were nervous about and then toss the yarn to the next person, who would do the same. The end result was an intricate web of yarn in the space between us. Sometimes I think back to the tautness of the web and how delicately I held my piece of yarn.

When the last person had shared their anxiety, and we had collectively taken a moment to sit with our fears, that same person would share something they were looking forward to. They would then pass the yarn to the person who had passed it to them, and, in this way, we would undo our web of anxiety.

IV.

I spent a lot of time at the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center as part of that class. It’s one of those man-made places that seems to defy the landscape around it by the very nature of its construction: It’s a cutting edge research hospital, with the many millions of dollars of equipment, talent, protocol and glass that come with any cutting edge research hospital, and yet, whenever I visited it, I felt as though I was stumbling upon it—tucked away behind pine trees and rolling rugged hills.

Once, in the winter, after conducting an interview with a doctor at the hospital, I waited for the bus to come. I was by myself, standing in the vestibule of the hospital, wearing a parka. It was dark already and the day had just begun. I wasn’t having the best day: The stress of senior Winter weighed on me unapologetically, and the bliss-turned-nostalgia of senior spring was still a quarter-turn of the sun away.

As I watched the snow fall heavy through the milky influence of a streetlight, I thought about how far away the spring felt and how removed I was from the rest of everyday life. This was not an unfamiliar feeling during the winter in New Hampshire. Few things seemed as consequential as the bitting cold and unrelenting snow. I was accustomed to the solitude and introspection prompted by the white, other-worldly landscape in much the same way one goes to a museum to confront the perspective-shifting influence of a strange work of art. Everything looked different in the winter, and in the most basic sense, that meant everything felt a little different, too.

And so I stood there, watching the snow fall heavy through the streetlight, thinking about how dark it was at 4pm and how bright it felt inside the hospital.

Recently, I organized a virtual get-together with my Senior Design Challenge class. I wouldn’t call it a reunion because reunions presuppose some sort of formality, which this didn’t have. We hadn’t lost touch and we weren’t reconnecting. We were just talking. It was a bright spot.

At some point, somebody asked:

“How’s everybody’s Part 2 of the pandemic going?”

Straight away, I liked this turn of phrase. It contained an idea elusive in its simplicity: Part 1 of the pandemic was when you thought it would end quickly. Part 2 is when you realized it wouldn’t and decided to make the best of it.

On the path to Part 2: The author and his girlfriend on a late summer’s walk.

VI.

I ended 2019 with a race in Fairfax, Virginia and woke up in 2020 with a calf strain. In many ways, rolling out of bed and limping over to the sink to re-hydrate foreshadowed the year ahead. If nothing else, it forced me to lower expectations for my running.

I spent a lot of time in the pool, swimming and “aqua jogging,” that is, miming the motion of running while suspended in and working against the resistance of water. Part 1 of this injury was characterized by a powerful disdain at having to conform my schedule and my mind to the concrete confines of the pool. But I wanted to maintain whatever sliver of fitness I could, and so I kept at it, in the pool, not liking it much at all.

A few weeks into my pool sessions, something strange happened: I started to look forward to them. I bought waterproof headphones, which, while a small investment, provided big returns in terms of my enjoyment of the activity, and signaled a mental shift—a Part 2 shift—whereby I affirmed to myself that I intended to make the best of my experience.

I started to look forward to the pool because I was beginning to see the bright spots. Some of the bright spots were things different from things I enjoyed about running. The smell of chlorine, the splashing of happy children, the consistent January-defying warm and humid climate of the aquatic space. Some of the bright spots were the same things I enjoyed about running: The promise of a reliable physical release, the creative opportunity to invent what I did each day with my body, the curiosity prompted by a new challenge.

I was aware of these bright spots at the time they were occurring, but it wasn’t until recently that I had the framework to understand that all injuries have a Part 1 and Part 2 and that the transition from Part 1 to Part 2 is a fundamental effect of healing.

The author writing outdoors at a cafe: A very Part 2 thing to do.

VII.

Shortly after my body was ready to run again, all races were cancelled. The early days of COVID-19 represented a severe departure from the comfort and promise of patterns and expectations for all people, including runners, many of whom now had to ask themselves: without races, why run?

I chose to answer that question early and definitively and for the same reasons I toiled away in the pool: the reliable physical release, opportunity to invent, curiosity provoked by new challenges. In other words, it wasn’t a difficult question for me to answer because for me, racing was a pleasant side-effect of training.

I went until September, just running to run, and then the races came back, sort of. I’m currently taking part in the “Quarantine Games,” a series of small, hybrid in-person (against other members of our team) and virtual races (our times are entered into a pool of times from other participating teams) taking place across America this fall. The COVID-19 protocol is strict, and the in-person competition is only against members of my track club, the Georgetown Running Club.

To perform under these conditions feels strange, a bit like a dress rehearsal, as in: the elaborate acting out of something I used to do more intensely. There are no crowds. No cheering. No gun to start the race. No competitors from other teams. No medals. There is only our coach, stopwatch in hand, mask on face, instructing us to “go” and then starting his watch. There is only his clipboard and pencil. The sporadic intimate encouragement of the rest of our teammates standing or jogging along the track. The clacker of spikes. The supremely human sound of my teammate’s breathing.

I’ve raced twice now in 2020. I didn’t think it would take me until the fall to do so. In both races, I’ve set personal records. My fastest times in each event. They won’t show up online, or get me into future races, because they aren’t official, not sanctioned by anyone but my coach and his stopwatch and the witness born out by my teammates. And that is perfectly alright with me.

Before one of the races, my teammates and I set out on a slow, begrudging jog to loosen our muscles for the impending effort. We had only been running for a few seconds when we saw our coach in the parking lot getting out of his car. As we shouted and waved to get his attention, I nearly tripped over the legs of the guy running in front of me. It would have been hilarious, in a sense, if that had happened: In the 7 long months of the pandemic, we had forgotten how to run as a group.

VIII.

With the pandemic, I like the idea of a Part 2 because it makes what is otherwise a senseless tragedy feel more like a narrative. It makes me feel like we are actors in a story, like we have agency, sense, and purpose. It begs the question of Parts 3 and 4, and reminds us there is an end to this, eventually.

IX.

For much of the spring and summer, during my Part 1, I ran with music whenever I could. It was a necessary, imperfect attempt to simulate conversation, adrenaline, energy, and, at its most desperate, emotion.

These days, I run without headphones — either in silence, or, more often than not, with my new roommates, who are also serious runners. Setting out from our home to run together is a perfunctory ritual that takes any day, however lousy or lofty, and eventuates it to nothing more than the simple boyish foolishness of running. When it comes to living, this is a tremendous advantage. Never too high or too low.

Some evenings, after work, I go alone; and these evenings are better for the days we went together. Time and space to think without the loneliness that renders time and space impossible to be used for thinking.

Some evenings, I run past the building where I used to work. It still glitters tall and glassy and many of the lights are on inside. I don’t know why. We won’t be back this year. If ever. Sometimes I think about how we all used to fit in there, all my friends and colleagues, and that gives the building scale.

Some evenings, I run past Black Lives Matter Plaza where the largess of the letters is made obvious during the minute it takes for me to run along their length. One night that I ran past, it felt like it was always about to rain, although it never did.

Some evenings, I run along the Potomac, in the utter darkness of the Virginia side, cast into shadow by its glimmering neighbor, Washington. In the darkness there is only the familiar staccato reassurance of my own two feet. In the darkness I am reminded of the old reliable resolution of endurance exercise, the consolation of repeated effort.

I smile behind the large, glowing screen of my MacBook at my Senior Design Challenge classmates, perched in concentric squares on my screen, smiling with that shiny electric Zoom-distinctive glow on their cheeks. They are taking turns updating the group about their lives. And as each person comes off mute, shares, and asks the next person to go, I think about how we used to pass the yarn.

Because, effectively, that is what we are doing. Passing the virtual yarn. And as we pass it, I think about telemedicine, about the project my team completed, about how revolutionary it felt a year and a half ago to use digital communication for therapeutic purposes. I think about how we are all doing that now, whether we like it or not, whether clinical or informal: we are all using digital communication for therapeutic purposes.

And, amidst all this thinking, a bright spot: The feeling of connection overcoming geographic distance. The feeling that our strength is derived not from our proximity but our connection. The feeling that this is very much a Part 2 phenomenon. The feeling of virtual yarn, something teetering on tangible, and at the very least, meaningful, that I can hold on to. The feeling I have held the yarn, taunt and delicate, and that I must do the next-most-natural-thing and pass the yarn to you.

Bright spot: Working late one night in 2019 with my SDC teammates.

Bright spot: Goofing off late one night in 2019 with my SDC teammates.

Bright spot: The author celebrating his 24th birthday with his family in 2020.