Following my bike ride the other day, as I frequently do I posted some pictures of my trip—this time to beautiful Lincoln Woods—on Facebook with a brief description of my ride.
Over the summer each such post attracted several likes and a few comments about the beauty of where I had ridden, but now classes have started and my unfortunate colleagues who are not on sabbatical may not be entirely appreciative of such posts celebrating sabbatical fun. Sure enough, a good friend and colleague from the philosophy department commented Get to work, Morgan! Given that this particular ride is a challenging fifteen miles with a number of steep hills involved, and knowing that my friend is probably not in the same bike riding shape as I have had the time to develop over the summer, I responded This IS work! Next time I ride here you’re riding with me! I’m sure we will continue this conversation as well as solving the multitude of problems in our department the next time we have a beer. Shortly after our brief exchange, a recently retired colleague and friend from the biology department chimed in on Facebook. “No, no,
no XXX,” she responded to my critic. “You have it all wrong. Sabbaticals are all about thinking (while riding bikes), then maybe when you get home, you write something down.” That’s the voice of experience speaking—she’s absolutely right. I responded “Very true! Seriously–the first drafts of two chapters of my big sabbatical writing project have been constructed while floating down a bike path.”
Although I have been dedicated to working out at the gym three or four times per week for the past twenty-five years, I have never come to appreciate the virtues of physical exercise to the extent that many reportedly do. I don’t like going to the gym, I don’t enjoy it; my working out habit was established and has been sustained by fear of what I would look like and what maladies might arise if I didn’t exercise regularly. But over the past two months I have experienced first-hand the power of the mind-body connection. 
The right kind of physical activity not only can be enjoyable but also can unlock previously clogged up energies and avenues in the mind and soul.
Not that I realized these benefits when I first returned to bicycle riding a couple of months ago after a decade absence. I spent several weeks familiarizing myself with the amazing number of fine bike paths in the tiniest state in the Union; my first ride was twelve miles, and I was inordinately proud of myself. I have incrementally built up to 30-35 miles per ride, rides in which I average about ten miles per hour including the break or two that my almost-sixty-year-old body requires. Not that I should be too proud of that pace, since the world record for running a 26.2 mile marathon is just over two hours flat. In other words, if I raced a world-class marathon runner on my bike for 26.2 miles, the runner would kick my bike-riding ass by roughly a half hour. 
I have no problem believing this, since an obviously experienced and fit young runner turned out to be very difficult for me to catch and pass on the East Bay trail the other day.
It wasn’t until about a week or so ago that I noticed I had entered a different riding zone than I had previously experienced. It was Tuesday morning so the bike path was not busy; I rode for several minutes without hearing or seeing anyone. What I experienced was the bicycle equivalent of driving a car for several miles without being consciously aware that one is driving. As I floated silently down the trail, I began to notice my surroundings with a new awareness. I had entered the ten-mile per hour zone. 
Several goldfinches in a bush on the right, a flock of geese in the river on the left, the sparkling glint of the sun shimmering on the water. As my consciousness shifted from “I’m riding a bike on this path in the middle of these trees and according to the mile markers painted on the path I am three miles from being halfway through this ride” to seeing the world around me as if I was not the center of attraction, the mental space necessary for new ideas slowly opened. I told Jeanne that evening that, strangely enough, riding my bicycle early in this sabbatical was doing the same sort of thing for me that reciting the psalms and saying prayers with a bunch of Benedictine monks on a daily basis had done for me during my last sabbatical seven years ago. Cobwebs and impediments are being removed by simply finding ways to get centered and discover what’s going on beneath the complicated and pressured surface of things on which all of us skate in our manic day-to-day existence.
This shift in attitude and focus is reaping noticeable dividends already.
- A beautiful male deer with a six-point rack strolled across a North Providence residential street as I was in the late stages of a ride a week or so ago. “Did you see that beautiful deer?” I asked a guy walking his dog just ahead of me. “Yeah, they eat my flowers,” he said. “Nothing but giant urban rats.” Talk about the importance of attitude and focus!
- On the same road a few days later, I encountered a flock of a dozen or so wild turkeys. I have no spectacular insights about this experience—I’m not that impressed with turkeys. But I’ve been on this road at least a dozen times in the last two months—why a deer and a bunch of turkeys in succession? There’ll probably be penguins there the next time I’m on the street—one can only hope.
- On a different trail I met a woman walking her dachshund for its morning constitutional. In a complete violation of the laws of introversion, I stopped and said “We have two of those at home!’ “Oh, I love them!” she said—“they’re so adorable!”
I got off my bike to check the little guy out—his name is Henry—and he immediately flipped on his back to get a belly rub. Just like my dachshund Winnie would have done.
These are minor events, for sure, but they are examples of what my father would have described as the universe responding to an open heart and mind. The world at ten miles per hour is a different sort of place. Slow enough for things to come to you, and fast enough to be endlessly new.
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