A great night for riding a bicycle in Edmonton

It's the end of October, it's 3 degrees Celsius, it's raining, it's dark, the wind hits my wet face at about 15 km/h. A great night for riding a bicycle in Edmonton. 

Let me explain myself. 

Which is the point, actually. What I'm searching for is myself. For me, a bicycle has just been the most reliable interrogation device I have ever found. I keep running my questions through it. 



I am just back from a 50-minute pedal from the north side. My tan Levi's went from pencil points of rain to splotches to tiny islands of dry fabric. The new asphalt shone oily. The green and red traffic lights projected lightsabers. Car tires sloshed. My nose leaked. I wasn't exactly warm. I felt alive. 

Hannah Arendt wasn't talking about riding a bicycle, I get it. But, still: 

Vitality and liveliness can be conserved only to the extent that men are willing to take the burden, the toil and trouble of life, upon themselves, Arendt wrote in The Human Condition. 

The unexpected visit from Arendt as I pedalled into the harder rain on Ravine Drive brought the truth home: cycling is labor. Round and round to keep going. The feeling of elation is the payoff of the metabolism. The feeling is the bliss of being alive. Speaking again for me, it's the  joy of balance. Not just the simple balance of staying upright on a bicycle, but the balance, too, of labor and joy. It's an egalitarian equation: the person feeling the joy is the person doing the labor. 

A sedan slid by on the 142 Street bridge over MacKinnon Ravine. For a second I saw he glowing instrumentation panels inside. I looked down at my light, which illuminated  specks of rain. Tiny Orion's belts of light in the dark street sky below. Tiny messages of Morse code. 



The message that I hear is: the world of sensation and insight and crazy ideas and bliss is opened with a little labor. Out there in the cold and rain that are laboured through. 

I know that I couldn't get there without my bike. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

:)

Image
One of the joys and dangers of studying in the MACT program is that you start to feel scared enough to feel confident enough to fool around and try simple new things with technology. The danger is that you're not good enough not to spend most of your time fiddling around doing those things. And, so, this morning I am proud to announce that, taken by the hand, I have managed to embed html vimeo code into my blog. Please, no applause. This is not much, I know. Your basic 8 year old can do more. Asleep. But it is a minor accomplishment for me, because of me. And how I get in the way with my pre-wired reaction that new things won't work. The effect of that kind of thinking (or that lack of thinking) is that I transform the machine in front of me into an antagonistic force working to undo me. But it does remind me of me when I attribute malevolence to the skies when they conspire to bring rain on a morning of golf! Either way, that's bad storytelling. On another leve...
Read more

Hello!

Image
The potential socialness of a bicycle is built right into its roofless and windshieldless and doorless frame. It is easy to say hello on a bicycle. Like this morning. These sidewalkers nodded to me in unison at the exact instant I nodded to them. I said hello to the jogger, and he waved back. Hi, I said, to the dog walkers and the dog, and they nodded a greeting back. Both joggers smiled and said hello as our lives passed. I said hello to the squirrel. I said hello to the woman walking with poles and she returned the hello. The jogger looked over and I said hello as she said hello. I said hello to this fellow egg picker upper and we talked for a couple of minutes. Her bicycle comes out April 1. She is excited. Hello, I said. Hi, she said. I said hello to the  man on the other end of this leash and he said he and his dog were enjoying the beautiful morning. I said hello to this woman and she said hello, and we laughe...
Read more

Some Late Thoughts Listening To Wheat Kings

Image
Wheat Kings in Edmonton, July , 2016 I asked a friend at work what The Tragically Hip song Wheat Kings was about, and he paused for a beat longer than he would have had he not considered the same question many times. And then said: "I don't know." I took this as a good sign both of his humility and the song's profundity. It was an honest question. I don't know much about The Hip. They were cool for the first time when I was watching my wife raise our children, and trying to help the mission where I could. Those were busy days. The 1990s are my mediated decade, preserved by photographs of my younger self. Among the art that didn't get in was The Tragically Hip's. And it was a dishonest question. I knew the song was about David Milgaard's wrongful conviction and wrongful jail time served for the murder of Saskatoon nurse Gail Miller. And it was an honest question, because song's visual shards—that weathervane, a killer's face lit ...
Read more