Quicker

“What you're missing is that the path itself changes you.”

It would have been quicker by car.

I had left home early, when the low hanging clouds were only just beginning to lighten.

But at least the wind hadn’t blown up by them.

It’s one thing to advocate for a simpler, more sustainable life. Another to actually live it. My meeting was a fair distance away and, though it would take a while, I had decided to ride there. The route was good, but it turned out to be too noisy.

The voices in my head were deafening.

Productivity was the loudest. “Why are you wasting the day like this? You could achieve so much more.” Then there was Guilt. “You have a real job to do. You should be more responsible… What about your obligations? Shame on you..”

Tarmac yielded to gravel as the miles passed, and the voices continued as the landscape unfolded before me. Wide spaces giving way to narrow lanes, beautiful treelined cycleways with autumnal colours that splashed across my path, leaves starting to swirl in the gathering breeze, clouds breaking and patches of sunlight painting the fields.

Slowly the awe and wonder of my day began to dissolve my anxiety; the nagging concerns for productivity and efficiency, those over-done, introjected values that have calibrated my days, were left on the trail. On approaching my destination, I even took a deliberate ‘wrong’ turn to dog-leg across rough ground, slipping and sliding through the mud, losing myself in the joy, physicality and simplicity of riding a bike.

As I eventually rolled breathlessly upto the café stop, our ‘office’ for the day, creative energy ran through me as, at last, my self-critical, evaluative perspective lost its grip.

Carlo Strenger tells us that:

“Our long-term self evaluation is a function of being valued in our cultural framework; knowing that who we are and what we do are appreciated; that our work as lawyers, designers, journalists, or physicians is good; that our clients appreciate us; and that we are producing value is a state that becomes part of our self conception.”

We all need to feel that our experience in the world is valuable and worthwhile, that our lives matter. But these judgements are made within implicit frameworks that are often defined for us, not by us. And it turns out that a sense of creative energy, slow travel, sustainability and an ecological relationship to our other-than-human world are mostly discounted, and the underpinning existential conundrums or philosophies that might inform those considerations are ignored.

So our question becomes what are these frames of reference and who do they serve?

After a couple of hours, our café conversation came to a close and we walked back the bikes. The wind had gathered and I knew the next few hours on the way home would be arduous and testing. We set a date for our next conversation over rattling gusts, then shouted goodbyes with a final resolution:

“…And let’s leave the cars at home…!”

Notes:

Carlo Strenger’s, ‘The Fear of Insignificance; Searching for Meaning in the 21st Century’ is a great help in overcoming the idea that our worth can be measured through rating scales or quantifiable measure. He asks us to create lives of our own making rather than fall for the contemporary demands of work or consumerism.

I really enjoyed ‘A Journey For Happiness’, a fabulous cycling book by Christopher Boyce. The back cover blurb begins; “I had always felt encouraged by society to judge others, and therefore myself. To find happiness I would need to let go of that judgement. And with time, I did.”