#346

Have come to identify yet another weakness in my psychic constitution, and as I type that, I want to joke that I need a better hobby. Of course the truth is that the process of recognizing and adjusting in response to our failings, our shortcomings, those foibles of our personality that go so far as to embarass us or harm us whether we are aware of it in the moment or merely ignorant is what Socrates was talking about when he mentioned lives and the due examination of them. So, regrettably, it is more along the lines of an endless duty, this critical process of becoming alive.

Anyway the thing was that one reason I got into walking is, sure, I lost the last of a string of bikes which I have owned and was unable to replace it for years. But also I was partially unwilling to replace it all those years because I had become focused on a solemn convitction regarding the physical, psychic, and spiritual benefits of walking. Correct; walking is the bomb; I have set a great deal into the record to that effect. But there's another side to that too. 

I walk really fast. Locally, I may be the fastest. No one, in my memory, since the time I reached about the upper end of my physical development in my teens, has passed me on the street, the sidewalk, the trail, or the field while walking, unless they literally broke into a half-jog. And, as is evident in the record, I have walked a lot. I'm just gonna say it: I walk like a beast, I am awesome at walking. I've thought about it a lot and put those thoughts into a great deal of practice. 

But even though I believe my style and speed on the bicycle are more than adequate and have rarely let me down, I exhibit nothing comparable to the prowess I possess on foot. I like to ride fast, sometimes as fast as I fucking can, and a lot of people are faster bikers than me on faster bikes to boot; it hasn't happened all summer (this entirely due to the fact that I've had the streets I beat basically all to myself on my rides), but it did today; this wiry dude probably in his forties rode behind me very politely for a while when things were narrow, but as soon as the bikeway opened he lit me up and smoked me to the stub. It was pretty cool. 

At the same time, something deep inside me misliked the feeling, and I knew in my heart that the root of the feeling has nothing noble or sportsmanlike in it at all, coming as it does from a traumatized part of my animal self that hates being approached from behind, hates being outperformed. And as I thought more on that, I came to understand that this part of myself had denied the rest of me the pleasure of two wheels on that basis, when I was weaker and reconstituting myself. And yet, in this, was it not acting to protect me, to set me on a path that would serve me better than the exhilaration of speed? That may be part of it, and it is certainly true also that it was acting selfishly, and would have done the same if it had hurt me--maybe did hurt me. But that is not the important part.

The only important part of any of it is the next step, which is to laugh at myself and begin to learn to let that shit go. And once it is gone I will breathe freer and be more alive. On foot, wheeled up, who cares. We all go at our own pace, and that pace is what it is, and that is right and good.

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We must be freer, and more alive; that is the point of philosophy, and life.

--JL