The other day I went on a little bike ride in my neighborhood, for exercise and to check mail at my post office box. I walked part of the way because sometimes I just didn't feel safe biking on the road, especially when construction blocks the bike lane and forces bicyclists to merge into the main traffic lane.

Some thoughts I had along the way:

 

• It just doesn't feel safe to share the road with cars. I wish it were legal for adults to ride on the sidewalk when it's safe to do so (when it won't cause danger to pedestrians, or to cars coming in and out of driveways).*
• Just as we Americans, when travelling abroad, plaintively wish that others would distinguish between America-the-government and Americans-the-people (as in, I myself am not representative of what my government does and please don't paint us all with the same broad brush), I imagine a bunch of Russians in the US right now deserve better than they're getting. I myself have said "Russians" or "the Russians" when I mean "the government of Russia" and should stop doing that.
• It's bitterly funny how I carry proof of my US citizenship with me when I leave my apartment, as though it were an amulet of protection, as though I will be able to force racists to honor my store coupon.

 

Today I feel better. I biked again today and tried a different street -- usually it's a busier thoroughfare, but today it had fewer cars, and (at my current stage of biking skill) I prefer the clarity of stoplights to the uncertainty of two-way-stop intersections. And - joy! - I biked home in the shade, which made me feel safer, because the sun in a motorist's eyes makes it harder for them to see me (the one time a car hit my bike, the sun was in the driver's eyes). I was able to bike the whole way to my destination and back.

After I came home, I reread a little more of Pat Barker's Regeneration, my current comfort reading. A main character, an anthropologist and psychologist, is counseling British veterans of trench warfare during World War I. He sees how their helplessness and immobility in the face of constant onslaught traumatizes them. I remembered a thing Mel Chua has taught in her "educational psychology for free-range learners" talk, about the factors affecting self-efficacy -- when you feel stuck and helpless while trying to learn something, it can help to get up, to stretch, to walk around, to remind yourself that you are in control of your own body. And I thought about what activities I genuinely find rejuvenating, taking me out of my worries and into the sensations and experience of the present moment and changing my experience of time. pidge once wrote, about motorcycling:

 

I ride because it makes me sane. It clears my head. It allows me to feel a sense of freedom. It's my 900cc therapy. When you are heading down I-5 at a speed that certainly isn’t legal, all of the bullshit that is in your head, all of your distractions, it gets the hell out or you turn into a wet smear on the asphalt. You are focused on nothing but the next quarter mile that will pass you buy at 9 seconds or so.

 

Over and over I find inertia drawing me to a sedentary life, and then over and over I inhabit my body and surprise myself with how much I love strenuously using it, how nourishing and joyful it is to power new journeys with my muscles. I hope I remember a little better this time.

* I looked up New York State traffic rules and New York City traffic rules to confirm; yup, as an adult, I am not allowed to ride my bike on the sidewalk. Side note: both the NYS Vehicle and Traffic laws and New York City Department of Transportation traffic rules have specific rules pertaining to horses, but neither of them defines "horse". In one case the NYC traffic rules refer to a "horse or other beast of burden" in case you want to use that while obscurely complaining to your housemate about carrying groceries.