I’ve been meaning to link to Mike’s blog for a while now. Ostensibly, he posts about biking. But each post is so much more than that. Photos of splendid detail in the rock. Friends laughing. Trudging through desolate, Arctic landscapes. All things that catch my eye and my heartstrings.
Not so recently, now, he wrote about stepping to the edge of your comfort zone, and then taking one step more. This post hit a particular chord with me. As a new biker last summer I found myself daily facing obstacles I wasn’t sure I could surmount. I rode over boulders then tipped over on pebbles, exactly because I reached that point “where your wheels will no longer role” and it became all about balance and finesse.
I’ve written before about working the transitions–about how grace on a bike can be a metaphor for grace in life. Here, Mike points out that subtle transition from upright to over, “got it” to “don’t got it,” and how riding that fine line of comfort and discomfort gets us to a place where we are entirely focused, totally present.
On the bike I have found those moments of presence–when my awareness of the bike disappeared and there was simply movement. One second I was here, facing rocks or turns or jumps, and the next I was through it. Fear and the incessant mind chatter about whether I was good enough or not, disappeared. We were at the top of the Doctor’s downhill, then I was through it, and thrilled.
Biking aside, this is what I’m striving for these days. Presence. Focus. Peace. I’ve given myself space for quiet and found there the deafening, obsessive voice of anxiety and criticism. So I’m looking into my toolkit and pulling out my tools, old and new, to try to redirect that voice. I don’t just want to smother it anymore. I’m realizing that for years I think I’ve been just coping; if I didn’t want to hear it, I made sure never to be quiet. I made sure I was beyond “good enough” in every external way I could from academics to athletics and beyond. But now, I don’t want to keep filling time and space with endless, pointless striving. I’m trying to face that voice. It’s been awful to realize how ever-present she is, but it’s also been amazing to start to imagine there might be another way. Presence. Focus. Peace.
