Boudicca & Bone Conductors
This Sunday email brought to you by Apple Mail and forgotten links
Why a Sunday email?
Apologies for the out-of-cycle email, but I got some messages about two things from friday’s post:
I didn’t link to my favorite headphones, and some people would like that link.
The link explaining who Boudicca was didn’t work for some folks!
Please allow me to remedy those errors below :)
Bone conducting headphones
I’m just figuring out the links-to-buy thing, so apologies for not linking to my preferred bone conducting headphones on Friday. I like these because you can download mp3s you’ve bought onto them directly, so don’t have to carry your phone with you on runs to use them. They don’t slip, and, since they’re made for swimmers, they’re safe for the heavy sweaters (like me!) amongst us :)
Boudicca’s backstory
Several readers have let me know that the link to the British Broadcast Corporation (BBC) explanation of Boudicca didn’t work for them,* so to save you an internet browse, here’s the tea on Boudicca:
Boudicca was a leader (some say queen; some say “queen” is an inaccurate characterization of British tribal hierarchy) of an important British tribe, the Iceni, and led a major uprising of allied tribes against Roman imperial colonists in 60-61 CE. Her army defeated the Romans in several successive battles, including one in which she destroyed London.
The Romans then sent in reinforcements and defeated Boudicca and her army at the Battle of Watling Street. Boudicca didn’t die on the battlefield, but likely took poison or suffered heart failure as the Romans closed in. However her life ended, her legend was launched. Her name would strike terror into Roman hearts for the remainder of the empire’s stay in the British Isles, and her leadership and courage has remained a powerful force in the British, anti-colonialist, and feminist imaginations ever since.
She is not a Catholic saint, having lived and died before Catholicism existed, but I used the idea of sainthood in my post to indicate that she is a person whose ideals and actions I look up to and try to emulate. Although she was a contemporary of Stoics, she was not a stoic and had likely never heard of them. That being said, she is a wonderful example of stoicism, since she accepted her position as a leader of the Iceni, even though it meant that she would likely fight a losing battle. She didn’t retire from the world, but took her power and used it as well as she could by leading her people.
In thinking about Dr. Alyssa Lokits and in considering my own position as a woman and a runner, I thought of Boudicca. I don’t want to go out and look for trouble; I don’t want to take unnecessary risks. On the other hand, I’m not going to curb my life’s experience because violence against women exists. Instead, I carefully and contextually calibrate between risk and safety.
In many ways, I think to exist as a woman in our society is to be stoic. On one level, we accept every day that the world is not fair, that we will be expected to be flawless when others get to be lawless. But on another level, we know what Epictetus knew 2,000 years ago: that we cannot control the events around us, but we can control our actions. That is why my patron saint is Boudicca, and that’s why I’m a stoic runner, as are so many of you!
Where ever you are, I hope you’re having or had a great Sunday! For today, remember: go run.
*My best guess on what’s happened is that the broken link seems to be connected to the Apple Mail app. So if you use Apple Mail, the link might have given you a 404. If you use another mail client, the link probably worked. I wish I could do something about Apple Mail, but alas! I cannot. If you have time, you might consider sending the following text to Apple support to let them know: support@apple.com:
Hi! I use Apple Mail on my device, and I think there’s a problem with links being broken by the mail service. I received a newsletter via Substack on Friday with broken links, but they were fine on the Substack platform and in other email clients. Could you take a look? I need the links to work in my Apple Mail! Thanks so much!