Wheels Up

This week, in one of the better developments to happen since the snow melted (in...February? It's been a lame winter, gang), I got my bike out of storage and started cycling to work. It's been glorious for my mind, theoretically will be glorious for my shedding-winter-weight goals, and perhaps most importantly gives me the excuse for my first post in (checks timestamps) seventeen years. After the jump: bikes and brambles!



My first day cycling, we had a high in the low fifties. To my wildly enthusiastic brain, this meant "idyllic springtime bike ride," forgetting that (a) my morning commute would be about 20 degrees colder, and (b) cycling at something like fifteen miles an hour means you're a real dumdum if you undertake a forty-minute ride without gloves.

As the wind carved spiteful accusations into my knuckles, I reflected on how good cycling has been to me. It was one of the great joys of my time in Boston when I got to bike my commute, partly because it sidestepped the many terrible alternatives, but mostly I think because it is a fundamentally meditative act. You're physically engaged, sweating if you're doing it right, but you're also gliding (and swerving around potholes). Crucially, you are not looking at a screen, you are not listening to podcasts, you're not even listening to music. You're in the moment, your thoughts flow freely, and your momentum reminds you that nothing in this world is a permanent condition.

You also become keenly aware of anything that's out of alignment. You listen to your body and notice a muscle in your calf straining, perhaps. Or maybe your entire world shrinks down to about four inch squares, one per hand, willing your blood to push back at the ice-bulldozers crushing into your skin from the air around you. You free associate. You get what Robert Pirsig calls lateral thinking in, aimlessly drifting between thoughts.

You start looking for the things in your life that are those four-inch squares that have become your entire area of focus. (An exam. An unfinished chapter. An unresolved argument. A misplaced keepsake.) You realize that two things can be true at once: these can actually be four-inch squares, and it can also be entirely reasonable that you've got tunnel vision around them. You remind yourself that you're in motion. That soon you'll be inside, you'll warm up, and you'll never leave home without cycling gloves ever again.

One of the forgotten joys of the ride is the sea legs/land legs shift when you've arrived after a hard, velocitous ride. You feel a bit drunk, a bit bowlegged, an incredibly dorky cowboy weaving down the block from the bike rack to your office. Your head's a bit clearer. Your muscles are alive. You've got that salt-lipped satisfaction of a good burst of something, even if the day to come has stretches of the mundane ahead of you.

It's nice, biking, it's just nice and good and nice.

Ol' Bikeyface, my loyal and trustworthy steed, all puppylike and giddy over getting to go on adventures again.

More updates, I promise (you lonely reader, solitary recipient of these blobs). A long-gestating chapter is about to go out the door, my heart is sailing into the stratosphere, and there'll be some good things to yammer about as all that unfolds. In the meanwhiles, why don't you get on a bike already.