Yes, I know, this parking lot doesn't look to be 500 miles long, and it isn't. Indeed, it looks longer in the photo than it really is. However, if you were to, let's just say, circle around it on your bike some 5,000 times, you would've traveled at least 500 miles. And gotten nowhere. A very zen thing to do. I speak from experience. I've put on 506 miles on my bike this season just by riding around this parking lot - like an obedient 7 year old whose mother told him that he could only ride his bike in the driveway. In many ways we get younger as we reach old age; more cautious, physically weaker, mentally less, shall we say, agile, not to mention those diaper things... So riding my bike around the parking lot is somewhat in character. That, at least, is my story.
However getting old is only part of the reason. The fact that it is the only flat surface on the hill we live on is my main reason for sticking with the parking lot. When I was a decade younger I used to spend two hours riding some 20 miles or more on my bike every day, spring, summer and fall, on a flat ex-railroad bike trail. Over the succeeding years I eventually cut that back to one 10 mile ride a day because my knees were aching by the end of the season. And then 4 years ago we moved to a new city and to the top of a hill. Between that hill and advancing age, I'm now down to a mere half an hour and 3 miles a day.
However, since 2010 when I purchased my Trek automatic 3 speed bike - a semi-dangerous solution looking for a problem - and the mountain bike I picked up at a yard sale several years later, I've put in some 26,700 miles on my bikes. And that doesn't include all the "miles" I've put on riding my bike on a rack these last half a dozen the winters, as the front wheel doesn't turn.
In any event, we live on the top of a hill and while one can ride around a small park and still stay more or less on the top of the hill, which I did for a year or so - one is still either going up or coasting down a slope, the going up of which wasn't doing my knees a favor.
Of course there is a wider world to ride than the top of our hill, but I have the feeling that either going up or down our hill would eventually kill me, though in different ways, so that's best avoided even with an electric bike. And while the city has plenty of bike trails and lanes, it's a hilly city so there wasn't many places to ride at my age without either an electric bike or tossing my bike into the van and taking it someplace to ride. Going someplace to ride is too much trouble and while buying an electric bike was something I considered, I realized that for what I ride my bike for, I didn't need to ride anywhere, so I didn't need it.
I ride a bike neither for exercise nor as a tourist, but for the zen experience of mindfulness, or in my case, for the opportunity to think of things - like the words I want to write - for more than 30 seconds at a time. It is a well known that doing something mindlessly repetitive, like walking, or in my case, riding a bike, is an aid to thought. Some of the most famous theoretical physicists were known to take long hikes in order to sorted out the quantum mysteries of the universe. I use the experience to string words together, over and over again until I can sit down and type them on the screen, like I'm doing now. And for that reason, I'm not concerned about the scenery. I knew the stretches of the bike trail I used to ride like the back of my hand after 15 years of walking and riding it. And though I'm no longer treated to the occasional sight of deer, foxes, turkey, geese other birds and all the wild flowers in season, that the bike trail through field and woods provided, I now get to talk to the neighbors when I'm out riding around the parking lot.
All in all, it is lucky for me I don't mind being seen as eccentric. I'm a writer and an artist, after all. As far as I'm concerned, being a zen bike rider is just another feather in my hat. Speaking of hats... well, we'll save that subject for another day.
Next week, the semi-annual report of my publishing company. Stay tuned.
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| The parking lot on the last day of the biking season. |
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