Late January Rideabout: in the flow looking for synchronisity

I’ve been on a few longer ‘rideabouts’ even though the winter temperatures have been cold. It has been below freezing for most of the day for the last week. Still, I need to go out and do a little ride almost every day and keep up on things. I have been riding the Jordan River Trail in Salt Lake City. It has gotten a lot of bad press lately, but I guess it depends on what activities you’d like to do along a river.

All cities have a river or a water space that usually has a bicycle trail nearby. I really enjoy riding in winter after Christmas. The colors have all washed out after Christmas. There are still a few hangers-on with lights on their houses at night, but for the most part, everything is normal. There are still some sore losers who’ve left campaign signs out as a protest. But it’s common time again, all the legislators have been sworn in and are legislating. And reading the signs on the chain-link fence, people are making plans for 2026! That’s exactly what I like about this time of year. It is common time again. Regular old usual time. The season has washed itself out. Clean up the campaign signs and the Halloween decorations! It’s almost February! Last year’s political speech is done now!

Roni 4 Commissioner!

Tell Celeste: November was 2 months ago!

It’s time to think about cleaning things up. It’s time for a new image this year. The light is bright and washed out. The trees have no vegetation. Everything is bare and laid out. It’s all washed out, Aquarius has arrived. Let’s go have a rideabout, think about that flow, that washout we carry in interest and in our minds over to the next year. I’ve been editing these photos from my rides this week and every one of them needs to have the exposure adjusted down to -1.0 units. What do all the units in photo editing software ‘mean’ anyway? These are just casual shots I’ve taken from my phone as I’ve been riding south along the river trail or west toward Magna and the Oquirrh mountains. I want to build a collection of these into some sort of interesting mosaic.

It is amazing what one runs into on even an afternoon trek. We don’t all of us have the time or the resources to go to some big, ‘epic’ destination each day or each week, but I firmly believe in getting out, especially when the days are sunny and bright. In this valley the light is enticing most days in any season. I could go some distance to find a place to hike. But with a bicycle, I can start from home and end up back there again. I could drive somewhere with snowshoes to a hiking trail, but I don’t usually like driving, honestly. I used to ski a lot but that got too expensive. And it is a heavily layered performance for something that amounts to going to a public park leased for an elitist activity. When I was a 100+ day per season skier, it always did play in the back of my mind a little how the amount of resources necessary to have a ski day was actually exorbitant for most people. When I had a different work schedule and the areas weren’t so mismanaged for crowds, I would get up early, finish my work by 10 or 11 a.m. and then hit the slopes and have a full day. 

My skiing career came to an end when I started working full time as a bicycle messenger. I think the only reason I was a messenger all those years was to chase that flow. When I was a bicycle messenger, I didn’t have time to ski at all. I was too tired on weekends and just wanted to recover. On an average day at that job, I would bike perhaps 10 to 20 miles depending on the day and it was all in short sprints hauling things - sometimes up to 50lbs of mail! I got my need for flow filled and I got paid for it. I found one of the few jobs left that pays a person not to sit still and to be outside.

That need to move around, to go down to the city on a frame and see the wonders going on there on the valley floor; that need stuck with me. It is something I always need. It is uncanny how easy it is to get into that flow state by bicycle. It is the same state we chase in skiing, in boarding, or even sitting still in a yoga pose or meditating. I’ve come to believe that human consciousness actively seeks out its flow.

Go with the flow!

In the autumn, I finally read the Hungarian psychologist Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi’s landmark work on the topic simply titled: Flow: the psychology of happiness. (“Michael of St. Michael” is the rough translation of Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi’s name from Hungarian, by the way. I gotta think this is like calling a kid Adam Adamson.) Names aside, Czikszentmihalyi’s book is really interesting. I had read excerpts when I had studied Recreation and Tourism but had not read the book in full. In this book Czikszentmihalyi covers the circumstances of the psychological flow state. In the book, Czikszentmihalyi’s discussion veers away from the usual clinical psychological discussion and into the analytics of mind seen in someone like Carl Jung. I love being out in flow, especially on a bicycle, because you experience all those little Jungian ‘synchronisities’ all the time. I enjoy reading analytic psychology as a branch of philosophy rather than the usual ‘crisis of mind’ psychology involving therapists and specialists and all kinds of behavioral problems we suppose we all have.

What Czikszentmihalyi and others represent is research in ’positive psychology’. This field studies the circumstances - internal and external - which bring about positive mental states in people. It turns out this is hard work. One has to do work in order to be well satisified. I would argue that a greater half of those individuals experiencing “anxiety” or deep paralyzing anguish is that they are actually avoiding doing work. And out here in their Zion which is my Babylon, work is viewed as a form of daily punishment as a ride on a prison bus to be kept for a certain time of day. We make this our habit - we view it our punishment that we do not ‘have enough.’ In Czikszentmihalyi’s discussion, flow is getting it, flow is satisfaction, flow comes from long hours of practice regardless of external forces telling us what we should or should not be doing for an activity.

I could, just here, get into a larger discussion of Aristotle’s ethics of walking around - the peripatetic school of Greek thought. I could further discuss the stay-at-home desires of Epicurus who advises the anxious to wall themselves in to a garden to enjoy life. And indeed, one gets into that state of psychological/mental flow by gardening. It is one of the activities exemplified by researchers on flow. There are a thousand activities that put us into flow and not all of them are, in fact, good for us. Anything can be done in excess - including withdrawing into one’s own private garden. Metaphorically, I think this is the discussion we are currently having socially about various work-from-home schemes. I can’t work at home. I usually like working outside. I am weird that way.

The yellow matches my pedals!

I spend many weekday afternoons goofing off while other people are ‘working.’ I am trying to get paid to sell books, art, and writing so I can continue goofing off. I tell people I am on the ‘perpetual bicycle tour’ and it seems this has worked out for me over the last three years or so. We all get paid in a way. We all, in the end, make our time worth it. I was thinking of these things - of flow, of paying and being paid, of productivity and of work on my little rideabouts this week. When you go down to the river trail one sees all worlds collide or intersect. There’s the intersection of lives wandering along the trail from all over. There’s bicycle and pedestrian - not nearly the controversy on a paved city touring trail as it is between more remote hikers and mountain bikers where the activities are much more seriously taken than a mere daily walkabout or rideabout.

I mentioned at the start that everything in this season is out in the open. Everything is bare and it moves more slowly so one moving quickly - as on a bicycle - has time to catch more. The lives of the city are laid bare on a river trail and are evident also. There are people camping in the margins right next to people playing a winter round on the golf course. That’s a view we think we only see in a distant place with ‘economic problems.’ We rarely go see what it’s like for others outside our own usual set of commutes, of networks, of destinations we arrive at and depart from each day.

Where are you going today?

At the end of each day, after having this bicycle habit of mine for so many years, I ask myself “where did I go today?” and “what did I do?” or “was there something memorable about today?” For the last five or six weeks I have been wintering with family and friends before the weather heats up for the next leg of the ‘perpetual bicycle tour.’ Winter brings with it a kind of monotony, a waiting time both before Christmas with Advent and after it with Lent. But in between there are a few weeks of common time, as I said above. The monotony can be anxiety-inducing, even depressing! The season requires more, somehow, in this season of fewer obstacles - from leaves on the trees to others on the trail. The season requires more bundling up, it requires a better sense of preparedness, it requires more energy to keep warm. Hills that I ride up quickly and easily in summer, instead become walk-ups in winter. There it is again - that flow. Of course things move slower in winter, everything is backed up, frozen, stiff, the chain lubrication is a little bit more viscous. Those are external factors, but the same might be true with our internal mental workings. The machinery of our human mind might, both singly and collectively, might need more maintenance in winter than in spring or autumn when daily conditions are more clement.

Keep up the flow! We are almost to the midpoint of winter. Groundhog day is next week! Clean up those old shabby decorations from last season’s holiday displays. Put them away until next year, go out on a rideabout and see what’s going on right now. I recommend a good pair of gloves and a nice hand knit scarf!