Astride the bicycle, a ride to work is a lesson in mindfulness. It’s early and the mind is still waking up, the air has its morning nip about it and the streets are crowded with others doing the same routine if but by different means. Distractions every one of them, but if you can maintain a steady focus, paying attention begets a certain measure of safety while mixing it up with the almighty auto.
Strafed by cars, an attentive mind is aware but never bitter, while a wandering mind at those times cut too close will be taken by surprise. Caught unaware, the mind’s reactive decision to act is an unpredictable crapshoot, helter-skelter at the whim of a course of unexpected adrenaline – dangerous indeed.
Inattentive behavior such as ascribing feelings to inanimate objects, while fun and quite natural, is a practice that’s hardly mindful. Observant? Yes. Telling? Yes (Rorschach would be intrigued). But hardly mindful and allowing the mind to engage in such a thing is no-more-than indulging in a cup of rich and creamy daydream, while doing so at the same time as riding a bicycle is temping a real and painful awakening off the road and in the ditch.
Tire tracks and litter, rocks and trees, dead birds and dead bees, wrappers of just about everything – all a whisper. The road’s dirt shoulder is full of such things and I can’t help but notice them there as I pedal along, allow my mind to wander, wonder how they got there, and…er…how they feel about it.
Crisply drawn by fresh deep treads or windblown to near oblivion, watchful tire tracks eye the details revealed in the morning’s brightening sky. Too preoccupied to notice my passing, absorbed in their vigilance, they stare, driven on by paranoid angst to constantly search for the dark gray cloud on the horizon – for the next rain spells utter annihilation.
Flying insects, yesterday airborne through cellophane-clear wings now lying broken bodied and smashed by windshields transparent make for such a six-legged carnage. While a once spry rabbit, now still and lifeless, is strangely silent in this chatterbox mind of mine. Not a peep as glossy black ravens circle and mob, rip and tear – still warm this breakfast.
The bike’s wheels roll along, kicking-up tiny rocks and smaller pebbles, displacing them, flipping them over, and turning their world upside down. I feel sorry for them, remorseful – but it’s a rock for God’s sake! They’ll make better friends in this new place I promise. There, that feels better.
One moment home in the good company of those beloved, and the next, some great, unknowable force has pinched and pitched them to a land so strange, out of place and never going back – They’ll make new friends, I promise.