riding and meditation

I take the train and then ride my bicycle into work. The ride is nearly six miles and takes me half an hour. The wind is often very strong across the fields and there is some effort. I pant and push and try to draft off of teenagers who make it seem effortless. Oh well. It's my first week of this and my body will become stronger. It is only Thursday and my GPS tells me I've ridden 42.6 miles since Monday.

The spring is shouting to make itself heard above the cold. Sometimes the frost covers the ground and kisses the faces of the yellow daffodils who wilt and withdraw for a time. The next day, when sunlight shines brightly cold though a bracing blue sky, the crocuses and hyacinths open up their mouths and kiss the air. There are birds everywhere. In the trees, with cheerful piccolo sounds, or on the water: ducks and swans and white-beaked blackbirds.

Sometimes I listen to audiobooks while I ride. While Dad was here, I listened to Claire North novellas. While I moved into my apartment, I listened to Neil Gaiman's Graveyard book. Then, sad to finish up the new territory and unable to settle on anything else, I returned to John Le Carre. The Constant Gardner, contrasting the hot sun of Nairobi to the biting wind that burned my fingers as I rode. Today I started Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy again and greeted George Smiley as an old friend.

What I do is tiring: the bicycling, the moving, the changing of my life, my circumstance, my friends; changing fields; learning material I never thought I'd need to know. I'm often so fatigued that my eyelids droop. And I'm often so ravenously hungry I descend on food like a starving seagull. When I'm not at work I'm alone. Too far removed from my intimate circle for their company, and too distrustful to reach out to anyone I know who could support me here. But there is a city full of people and I will begin to collect them.

Meditation is a good way to keep the panic at bay but sometimes I feel it anyway. The fear that I will loose this too. This is the danger of loss: you understand your own fragility. You know your own mortality and it becomes dangerous to have things you care about because loss will sidle up beside you and whisper in your ear, "don't be too attached. I can take this, too."