Tag: biking

Sadness place

Earlier today, I wondered: where is sadness in my body?

My first thought was my heart. That was too obvious and a thought rather than a feeling. A few, split seconds later, I sensed my feet. Again, here I was returning to my feet.

A few months ago, I resolved to care for my feet in ways that I care for my hands. I’m still not doing that across the day as my feet are below my waist, not easily above my waist hundreds of times a day. Yet, I am offering more attention, soothing embrace of my two feet and ten toes. Still, this is not enough.

I won’t replace my shoes and socks with some sort of glove for walking but I do wonder how to afford ny feet more love when they are adjacent to the ground and so much of my day is spent upright, and when I round up, my eyes are six feet off of the ground. And my feet are just about six feet away from my brain with all these other body parts in between and clamoring for their own sort of attention, affection, acceptance, allowance, and appreciation.

So, the sadness. It may also be in my back. Weighing on my back. Scratching my back. Hunching my whole body forward, leaning forward towards the coming onslaughts of the rest of the day and future days. Tightened in my back. And constipated like knots in my back.

I was asking for the location as that may be a passageway into my tears, if and when I can locate the sadness. The mild sadness of four decades isn’t the pangs of sadness that beget sobbing. Mild sadness has created a callus of enduring, and of keeping on in the presence of so much shit that abounds and surrounds. I’ve banished certain categories of shit and suffering — quitting jobs, eliminating manipulators, ghosting on dickheads, refraining from professional sporting industry hoopla and hype from devouring weekends and evenings. But there’s thousands more types of shit and suffering beyond these few.

And I’ve pushed the squalor into some far corner or high shelf in a closet within this body where I don’t stick my hands or cast my eyes. Switching from neglect to attentive is not an easy pivot. Or maybe it is, but I’m in need of ways to come into that sadness without dissociation or critical analysis. That feels like the balance needed for bike riding, not leaning too far towards the side of critical analysis not leaning too far forward or backwards that I flip over handlebars or fall off of the bike seat. I learned to bike at a late age, later than most, and maybe, I’ll do something similar when it comes to learning to feel the big sad. Maybe that place where my butt is on the seat and my feet are on the pedals is not that far away. But, I ought to figure out where to place my feet and my hands and where to place my back without getting too heady as I go there.

Swobo love by light rail

Two weeks ago, I brought Queenie (my Seattle bike, which is named after the pet chameleon that a colleague once had) on the light rail. It was a little later than I normally commute.

As I arrived to the Columbia City station on MLK blvd, I had to cut the crosswalk (despite Seattle’s zany enforcement of jaywalking) as the train was approaching. An elderly couple was in front of me — she on foot, he straddled a bike. And a typical Schwinn or some other named biped. Since he took the first door, I biked past him on the platform (probably a no-no) to the second set of doors. That’s where the bike hangar is. After he got over the shock of getting beat to the hook, I told him that I wasn’t hanging there. He thanked me. And then he began to covet my bike with his eyes.

He looked, admired. Pointed it out to his wife. He looked at the handlebars. And outloud said ‘Swo-Bow.’ after realizing that his voice was audible to me and the rest of the lightrail crew, he looked up at me.

– Nice looking bike.
– Thanks, it rides well.

I exited at the following station to walk to the next car. Once I hung the front wheel, I stood in the doorway to have the room for my morning stretches and twists. In the course of the next 20 minutes, I had two other grown men, one Asian-American and then a Black man, engage me about the bike. It brought a morning smile to the first guy, and a number of questions from the second.

All in my first 40 minutes out in the morning commute.