Here’s the text for the 16 June 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

This spring I watched the London Marathon, which courses through my neighborhood and brings a thrill to the air. First the wheelchair racers like a shock of lightning, then the elite runners like gazelles, then 55,000 other folks, covering 26.2 miles at different paces, with different gaits, and it’s a beautiful sight.

My friend Ali ran this year, and I’d promised him a water bottle as he came down my street. I was following his progress on an app, but suddenly my phone died and would not be resurrected. And so instead of focusing on my screen as I had for the first hour, I looked up. I scanned the shimmering crowds for Ali’s face, and I got lost in a trance at all those beautiful human beings.

Some joyous, some grimacing, some stopping to rest, some just to pet my dog. Some running in memory of a loved-one, some running just because, some as a rite of passage to mark a life-event.

I ran my first marathon in Chicago in 2010 to celebrate one year sober. The course took us past a bar where I’d routinely gotten bladdered – and as we ran by, I felt so different from the years before. No longer hungover, isolated, or numbed-out – but instead grateful, connected, and so-much-more free.

Thomas Merton, a Christian monk, found himself one day unexpectedly in the swell of city-centre crowds. He wrote: “I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realisation I loved all these people: they were mine and I was theirs … such a relief and joy, I almost laughed out loud. It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race. If only everybody could realize this! But it can’t be explained. There’s no way of telling people they’re all walking around shining like the sun”.

I love that. I felt that enchantment, too, watching the race. Someone held up a sign that read: “Hey, random stranger – you’ve got this!”

We are random strangers, yes. And – as a Christian, I believe – somehow, deep-down, we’re all connected; we’re true kin; we’re part of the same radiance.

I forget that sometimes: I get stuck on myself. But then I look up, and all those gorgeous human beings. And suddenly there’s Ali, appearing out of nowhere, a huge smile on his face, a drink of water, a high-five, and off he goes. Off we all go, into the human race: every single one of us shining like the sun.