Ode to Shoelaces

An experiment in gracious brevity.

I’ve long been a fan of James Parker, staff writer at The Atlantic. His odes to everyday events served as the magazine’s end matter for several years and explored the magic of the mundane—cold showers, chewing gum, crying babies, and, my personal favorite, running in movies.

This summer, Parker published these odes in a book, Get Me Through the Next Five Minutes: Odes to Being Alive. In his introduction, he encourages the reader to be ode-ready: open to the wonders we might encounter in the trivial when we’re willing to pay attention.

Reading it, I realized I might have some odes in me—bits of gratitude about movement, sport, and running. So, I’m going to try to share a few over the coming months. I hope you enjoy.

Midjourney generation.

String of cloth and rubber. Material paradox: sinuous and yet anchored; fluid and yet knotted; humble and yet essential.

It’s the most trivial of clothing, but when it unravels, you are undone. Recall those bent-over moments, panicked, frantic fumbling at your footstrings while the race, the world, your very life passed around you. Unexpectedly untied, you realized then the quiet importance of a shoestring.

Hyperbole perhaps. But consider the shoelace’s history. Traces were found on the oldest leather shoe in the world. They span cultures, geographies, materials, and millennia. During World War II, Gurkha soldiers, fighting for the British, were said to crawl through night patrols feeling for the straight-bar lacing of Her Majesty’s imperial boots. Those discovered with the criss-cross pattern favored by the Japanese and Germans were swiftly dispatched. Likely myth, but revealing: an empire looped together through intersecting lace.

Tying my shoes usually happens without a second thought, a reflex as automatic as pulling up my pants. But this morning, it felt like a ritual. My foot slipped through the cuff, and I threaded deliberately through each eyelet, slackened lace pulled up into my hand in a series of tight tugs—a Japanese tea ceremony of economic movement.

And then … a dance of fingers! Loops, swoops, and twists. Digits intermingling as lace choreographed through pliés and arabesques in a prehensile ballet of enmeshed fingers and cloth.

According to the internet, no other creature on earth can tie a shoe. Does that make the shoelace the most human of adornments? A functional ornament that ties us through work, play, sport, craft, dance, dinner, driving, and more.

Yet despite its ubiquity, the humble shoelace defies disruption. In an era when running shoes feature springs, space-age foams, and heat-defying fabrics, they’re still held together by the same tech that bound medieval turnshoes. Indeed, the last notable innovation to the shoelace was the aglet, the tiny tip that makes threading the lace easier. And that was in 1790.¹

There’s something almost counter-commercial about the shoelace. It improves with use. As you walk or hike, run or dance, your laces collect the world—dirt, mud, dust. Your sweat is absorbed into the cloth, pieces of you now held in that shoelace for all eternity. All this wear only adds friction, helping the knot hold tighter.

And the knot! Every one a singular event, formed in a fleeting moment of fingered precision, never to be replicated. No knot is ever the same. Once undone, it’s gone forever, unlaced impermanence.

Watch someone tie their shoes—you’ll never do it the same way. Your knot is your own, taught to you long ago by some gentle elder, and grown with you over time. A tango of loops, swoops, and twists, entirely yours.

It’s like handwriting. A signature, tied with ribbon. And it is beautiful because only you could make it so.

Thanks for reading. What would you write an ode to this week?

Four reads I loved

• ”Why Your Street is Wide Enough to Land an Airplane” by

  Andy Boenau

  • If you enjoyed my intersection piece, read this post on Level of Service (LOS) traffic analysis: “If you only remember two things about LOS, remember: 1. LOS measures how long drivers sit at an intersection, and 2. LOS does not measure safety. Those two facts are not in dispute, but it’s rare for transportation professionals to admit the second.”

• “How Much Should You Push Yourself” by

  Rachel Katz

  • Katz considers the Goldilocks zone of effort as a matter of practice and deep sensitivity:

    • “I have to land on the “right” level of push based on feel, and this is a learned skill that I have not practiced much. To complicate it more, the right amount of push changes day by day and month by month. Running has been a fantastic instruction in this . . . It is an important skill to read the signals and push when the energy is there and let up when it’s not.”

• “The Art of Taking It Slow” by Anna Weiner.

  • I enjoyed this New Yorker profile on bicycle designer Grant Petersen, whose company Rivendell Bicycle Works produces bikes that are low-key, anti-corporate, and functional. It’s a vision opposed to the competitive ethos that has defined cycling design for several decades:

    • Petersen believes that the bike industry’s focus on racing—along with “competition and a pervasive addiction to technology”—has had a poisonous influence on cycling culture. He dislikes the widespread marketing to recreational riders of spandex kits, squirty energy gels, and workout apps such as Strava. He thinks that low, curved handlebars contort riders into an unnatural position; that bicycles made of carbon fibre and aluminum have safety issues; and that stretchy synthetics have nothing on seersucker and wool.”

• “The Paradox of the Distance Runner” by Maggie Doherty

  • Speaking of Little, her book The Examined Run was reviewed in the New Republic by Maggie Doherty alongside Maggie Mertons’s Better Faster Farther. Viewed together they’re dual examinations of limits, Merton unpacking how running disrupts the cultural boundaries set by sexual identity politics, while Little has a chapter arguing that given our embodied existence, we should “make peace with our physical restraints.”

Tweets of the week

1. “Behold, The Aglet: That Thing On The End Of Your Shoelace,” Huffington Post, June 22, 2016.“