Let's ride bikes for re-creation!

 "I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."

Henry David Thoreau

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Everything, and I mean everything, was difficult, everything hurt, following my divorce.  

But surely, dear reader, you already know this. Perhaps that's because you have been gracious enough to have read the words I've previously written on this subject here on my blog.  

Likewise, perhaps, you're not super-stoked to read more of them. This is, after all, a bleak topic.

FEAR NOT! For my intention as pertains to this latest entry (the one you're still reading (Thanks!)) is to explain to you how, in my attempts to reorient myself post-divorce, after having turned many dark and disappointing corners, I'm starting to feel like, maybe I'm getting somewhere. 

I'm hopeful in this post to describe for you the origins of this newfound perspective, how I arrived here, a few paces beyond the landscape of my annihilation, my ground-zero, to a place where I have regained some small measure of the good which I believe still resides in my heart.

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I have a good heart, for which I am ever grateful.

I mean that, of course, quite literally. 

But also metaphorically.

After months and months of effective and uplifting professional therapy, thousands of sincerely self-reflective written words (Thanks, cannabis!), scores of interesting conversations with many also-divorced men and women, the earnest support of my good friends and loving family, aaaand a few undeniably clarifying microdoses of psilocybin, I'm beginning to feel like I'm drawing nearer to being able to view myself, at the very least, as someone somewhat partially-restored, re-created in fact, a newly viable human being (albeit perpetually of the work-in-progress variety now), less consumed by sadness, regret, and self-loathing than I have been for some time.

Let's add hundreds of bike rides alone in the woods to that list. In fact, let's put it somewhere near the top.  

Every single one of the bike rides that I've been on in the last 20 months has helped my healing immensely. 

In the first dark weeks after my divorce, I rarely rode my bikes.  When I did, the rides were brief and uninspiring.  An obligation, the fulfillment of a promise I'd made to myself, but a pantomimed attempt to return to some form of normalcy more than anything else.

My heart, quite literally, wasn't in it. I was just going through the motions.

Nevertheless, slowly, over the course of many many months, my riding became more regular, and similarly, more enjoyable.  I remember sharing with my therapist in one of our initial meetings the simple observation, "Everything feels better the moment I get on a bike, my body, my heart, my head.  All of me just feels better when I'm out riding in the woods."

But why?  Maybe it has something to do with the dharmachakra.  Don't really understand a lot about that yet, but I'm intrigued...  

Meanwhile, I'm testing a few personal theories of my own.

The first one pertains to the health of my (literal) heart.  I've been riding with a heart rate monitor for three summers now, started doing so even before I got divorced.  Like a lot of guys my age, my heart-health is kinda always on my mind.  So I measure it.  On every ride.  And as I was saying above, I'm fortunate to have a good heart.  Some of that is due to luck, some of that is due to having been able to access adequate health care all my life, but I think a lot of that is also due to the fact that I have been riding bikes regularly, almost daily, for some 40 years now. 

Being physically (literally) heart-healthy during this otherwise acutely emotionally/psychologically diseased phase of my life has been a huge blessing.  Without that it surely would have taken me much longer to begin to recover and to start to heal my wounded (metaphoric) heart.

Another working-theory I have is about proprioception, which is a big word that implies "your body often remembers what your (metaphoric) heart has forgotten." Conveniently, it turns out our bodies do this especially well when we're just going through the motions. Each time I ride I am reminded: I am competent.  I am strong.  I am able to experience pleasure and even joy.  Increasingly so, ride after ride after ride, in fact.  

I think, sometimes, the reward of effortful exercise, productive struggle, is just the struggle, doing the hard thing.  During each sortie on my bike I am aware of my skills getting sharper, my body becoming fitter.  In the throes of a time in my life when I felt overwhelmingly worthless, my bikes were nonetheless able to remind me: I can do hard things; I can do them well; and I can revel in the abiding satisfaction (the dopamine flood) of having done it just because it was so fricken fun to do!

The last one is solitude. For me, solitude is often the antidote to loneliness.  

I still encounter hurtful loneliness all the time, especially when doing life's most mundane tasks, the everyday things I used to do with her... taking the pets to the vet, doing laundry, putting clean sheets on the bed, eating at the table in the kitchen, driving between Flagstaff and Scottsdale to visit family, just watching TV shows in the evening.  These are the ghosts I am still struggling to exorcise from my home.  Home continues to be such a brutally lonely place at times.

But the solitude I experience every time I'm out in the woods alone on my bike is different.  

I've been blessed to have been able to spend a great deal of my life, since I was little kid, wandering around in the woods, going to places with beautiful vistas, looking at old stuff others have left behind, but mostly just sitting, being quiet, atop big rocks or beneath big shady trees.  

Solitude has never scared me.  In truth, I think it often inspires me, sometimes it also intrigues me. So I spend a portion of every solo ride doing this: sitting somewhere next to my bike, being me, listening to both my beating and my broken heart, alone in the woods with my thoughts.  And one beer.

This is the landscape of my re-creation.

It is in such moments of solitude that I am reminded, once again, of my good heart.  

I am grateful for the blessings it receives each day.  

I have Enough: 

• An amazing relationship with my amazing kid. 
• An abundance of good friends with whom I share many common interests. 
• A vast family who continue to surround me with love and support. 
• Daily opportunities to feel my living body work hard and receive joy.    
• And innumerable places wherein I am able to contribute to my community, apply my sundry skills with diligence, and receive kindness  in return. 

I have a good heart.  And it is full.

An unironical inverse ordering of sundry broken things

My father always said, "If it's a problem that can be fixed with money, it's not really a problem." 

He was, for much of his life, a person of some means, however, so this was a fairly simple thing for him to be able to say. Nonetheless, I get it.  There are problems in this life that cannot be fixed, no matter how much money you have.  Real, heartbreaking, chronic, sometimes fatal problems.  I understand this difference all too well.

I, unlike my father, am not a person of means.  To that end, I, personally, have found that the compounding effects of encountering many broken things in a short span of time can be challenging, despite the fact that many of those things are, indeed, fully reconcilable assuming you're willing/able to spend of the appropriate amount of money to purchase a solution.  

Which is to say, most but not all of my recent problems have been of this type, the kind that can be fixed with money.

Below is a list of a few of the recent challenges I've faced, described in inverse order of the impact the broken thing had on my emotional and/or financial well-being, from least to greatest...

The Settlement Of The Night Monster

[audio]

This post was originally written and published at rockchrysler.com in July 2013.

What follows is a true tale, or at least as true a tale as I am able to tell of it these days, so many years later, about a trip I took to the Galapagos Islands with my grandparents when I was 10 years old in 1977. It is a tale based, at least in terms of its sequence and style, on this poem which I wrote for Beckian Goldberg's ENG 200-something Introduction to Creative Writing poetry workshop as a sophomore at Arizona State University in 1987.

The photos below are also mine, taken by ten-year-old me with my prized Kodak Instamatic camera.

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"Yes, the night monster will settle there and will find herself a resting place."

Isaiah 34:14b

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Santa Fe Island, Galápagos
27 October 1977

It was a sharp knife, much sharper than most ten-year-old boys would tyically be allowed to possess.

And it was the right knife, too, its stainless three-inch-long blade and array of Swiss-army implements perfect for carrying confidently in one's front pocket all day long, especially on a grand, far-away excursion such as this.

The fish, lying on its side on the deck, a large trolling-hook pinned in its lower jaw, also gauged the sharpness of the boy's knife; its wide, unblinking eyes betrayed its awareness, as it gaped and gasped in desperate need of oxygen. It needed to die, wanted to now.

"Kill me," the fish told him.

Let's work at the local bicycle shop!

This post was originally workshopped on my Instagram and in the Fifty+ Years Old forum at mtbr.com.

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Old-man. Mouthbreather.

I never thought of myself as old. 

Until recently. 

The harsh reality of being me in this moment is that I’m at least 30, and in several cases 40 years older than everyone I work with at the bike shop (except for my good friend, Ken, who owns the place and has a couple years on me). Despite this constant reminder of my ever increasing age, it is, nonetheless, my privilege to toil alongside all of these amazing young people selling this thing (selling an experience, really) that we all passionately, even obsessively love. 

But this work, like all work, is hard work. "That's why they call it Work," my hard-working baby brother is fond of saying.  Retail at the sales-floor level, no matter what you're selling, is super tough and any amount of time spent working on the (concrete) floor during the summer season at Absolute Bikes Flagstaff is guaranteed to be a marathon endeavor. Not only is there a lot to know about each make and model of bike we sell, and an obtuse and thoroughly unintuitive point-of-sale system to master, there's also the simple fact that every customer who comes in through the front door brings with them a unique set of challenges due to their distinct personal peculiarities and predilictions.  

Just about a bike: Surly Moonlander

This is my Surly Moonlander. 

It is a first generation Moonlander, which Surly debuted in 2011, and discontinued in 2016.  This bike should not be confused in any way with Surly's new freaky-deaky ground-up redesigned 2025 Moonlander; they are two completely different bikes.

Actually, technically, this bike is not really mine.  It's a loaner from a good friend who moved away. He asked me, while I was helping him load the last of his family's stuff into their moving-truck, if I would be willing to keep it in my garage, on stand-by, for him to ride whenever he came back to town to visit.

Like I said, he's a good friend, so of course I agreed. Especially after he told me it would be fine with him if I rode it around whenever I cared to. 

In the years that it's been housed here at my place, of course, I have.  Many, many times.

Meantime, my friend, well, I'm happy to say he has been back to visit several times. 

Nonetheless, despite his repeated visits, he's ridden the bike just once... So...

Let's get a new tattoo!

It has long been said regarding semantics that “the word is not the thing,” the implication being that all language, both text and speech, can only attempt to represent ideas and feelings but cannot actually be the Real thoughts or sensations it describes.

In December 1996 I sat down to get my first tattoo, three small Hebrew letters (חֶסֶד = lovingkindness) on the ring finger of my left hand. It took the artist about five minutes to install it and cost me a grand total of $45, which I paid in cash.  I used the word, chesed (pronounced KHES-ed), as a framework for a part of my vows a few days later.  

And I meant it.  I know I was an imperfect partner at times.  But I really did try to live every implication of the word, as well as the indelibility of the deed, each day of my 28-year marriage.

Selected posts now streaming!

** selected posts now streaming **

I was a volunteer reader for Sunsounds of Arizona for several years. It was a favorite amongst my many unpaid retired-guy "gig" jobs. I was proud to be tasked with reading the Arizona Capitol Times (a non-partisan, weekly newspaper covering state politics and government) for their visually challenged listeners on a weekly basis. Sadly, administrative shake-ups within the organization last year made it untenable for me to continue to provide audio content to them.

As a classroom teacher for 20 years, I read aloud to my students each day, commonly following lunch recess, as a way to decompress and refocus our brains after the midday outdoor activity time.