Reflections on a Stationary Bicycle

Last Monday the instructor of my spinning class showed a video of a bike race in the Netherlands (Amstel Gold Race 2015) as we rode our stationary bikes hard enough to reach our maximum heart-rate zone.

In no other circumstance would I watch a bike race for forty minutes. But pedaling and perspiring along with my fellow exercisers, I was exhilarated by the energy and grace of the cyclists and the beauty of the countryside on the screen. Sometimes we got an aerial view of farmland with fields looking like pieces of a patchwork quilt in various shades of green. Then down one of these country roads snaked a row of bicyclists racing to the finish line. I suppose I could feel those racers a pathetic contrast to my stationary machine, but I didn't. I felt motivated and moved by their perfection.

And for some reason, I stared thinking of the layers of human life present in that moment on my bicycle, connection present in every other moment as well.

This connective web contained the instructor and cyclists; our bikes and everything involved in

making them and having them ready for us when we arrived for class; and the technology involved in making it possible for me to watch men riding bicycles in he Netherlands whiled I exercised in South Bend, Indiana. Then, there's everything that went in to making the bike race happen. There seems no end to the actions of others that made that moment possible. It is always like that I think.

 

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Enlightenment is intimacy with all things. Dogen

To Sleep...

I just started reading The Sleep Revolution by Arianna Huffington. Here are two interesting passages from the introduction.

...do you know what happens if you type the words “why am I” into Google? Before you can type the next word, Google's autocomplete function—based on the most common searches—helpfully offers to finish your thought. The first suggestion: “why am I so tired?”

I'm confident you will come away from this exploration with a newfound respect for sleep. But you may also find yourself beginning a love affair with it. We need to reclaim this special realm—not just because sleep makes us better at our jobs (thought there's that) and not just because it makes us healthier in every way (there is that, too) but also because of the unique way it allows us to connect with a deeper part of ourselves. Because when we are asleep, the things that define our identity when we-re awake—our jobs, our relationships, our hopes our fear—recede. And that makes possible one of the lease discussed benefits (or miracles, really) of sleep: the way it allows us, once we return from our night's journey, to see the world anew, with fresh eyes and a reinvigorated spirit, to step out of time and come back to our lives restored...

The Mystery of Love

In 1996 Mariana Cook interviewed Michelle and Barack Obama. Barack said this about Michelle.

Michelle is a tremendously strong person, and has a very strong sense of herself and who she is and where she comes from. But I also think in her eyes you can see a trace of vulnerability that most people don’t know, because when she’s walking through the world she is this tall, beautiful, confident woman. There is a part of her that is vulnerable and young and sometimes frightened, and I think seeing both of those things is what attracted me to her. And then what sustains our relationship is I’m extremely happy with her, and part of it has to do with the fact that she is at once completely familiar to me, so that I can be myself and she knows me very well and I trust her completely, but at the same time she is also a complete mystery to me in some ways. And there are times when we are lying in bed and I look over and sort of have a start. Because I realize here is this other person who is separate and different and has different memories and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings. It’s that tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong, because, even as you build a life of trust and comfort and mutual support, you retain some sense of surprise or wonder about the other person.

Joy

Yesterday's post was so grim, I need to show the other side of things today. I'm sure I've posted this flash mob before, but here it is again, today, bet flash mob I've ever seen.

Hell in Europe

I haven't posted much here for awhile, partly because I have been reading this tome. It my be the hardest book I have ever read. It's long, dense, and full of horror. Chapter 8, “Hell on Earth,” begins with this description of World War Two which is close to a summary of the book. I'm left marveling at the awfulness and amazed that Europe has recovered so well. 

For millions of Europeans the Second World War, more even than the First, was the closest they came to hell on earth. The death toll alone—over 40 million just in Europe, more than four times as high as in the first World War—gives a sense of the horror. The losses defy the imagination. The Soviet Union's alone were more than 25 million. Germany's dead numbered around 7 million, Poland's 6 million. The bare figures convey nothing of the extremities of their suffering, or the misery inflicted on countless families. Nor do they give any impression of the geographical weighting of the immense casualties....

Unlike the First World War civilian deaths in the Second greatly outnumbered those of the fighting troops. This was, much more than the earlier great conflict, a war that enveloped whole societies. The high death rate among civilians was not least a consequence of the genocidal nature of the Second World War. For, unlike the war of 1914-18, genocide lay at the heart of the later great conflagration. This war brought an assault on humanity unprecedented in history. It was a descent into the abyss never previously encountered, the devastation of all the ideals of civilization that had arisen from the Enlightenment. It was a war of apocalyptic proportions, Europe's Armageddon.

I was inspired to read this book after consuming a lot of both prose and fiction about WWII. The book provided an overall context, but it's a hard to comprehend so much suffering. What else can I say?

Decisions, Decisions

I have been rereading parts of Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. I guess it could fall in to the self-help genre, but what makes it particularly interesting to me is reports on research and studies that help us identify barriers to change. I have been reading it this time from the perspective of ways this research could help my dyslexic grandson improve his reading. As I watched him read and write today, I was aware of how many decisions he needed to make every time he read or wrote. “Is it this or that?” So much of it is not automatic to him. Over and over again, he must ask, “Is it this or that?” And over and over, he must struggle with self control. The authors emphasize that both self-control and decision making are exhausting. No wonder my grandson is reluctant to read and write; it's tiring work. And no wonder I'm procrastinating with a writing project right now. It's at the stage where many decisions are required.

Happy Sun-Day

The View

This window is at the Metropolitan Club Restaurant on the 67^th floor of the Willis Building (formerly Sears Tower) in Chicago. Directly under the window is the table where one of my daughters, two of my nieces, and I had dinner last Saturday night. The food was fine, but we chose the place for the view, not the food. We got to look down on tall buildings and Lake Michigan. Before dinner we were part of a swarm of people walking through Millennium Park. Coming from South Bend, Indiana, it was a dramatic change of perspective. That, I think, is a good and helpful thing.

Gabby Speaks

As you probably know, Gabby Giffords is the former member of the U.S. House of Representatives who was seriously injured in an assassination attempt in 2011. In 2013, she and her husband Mark Kelly started a political action committee called Americans for Responsible Solutions devoted to promoting gun control legislation. I donate a little money to their PAC and receive email updates from them. The mailing yesterday was mainly a plea for money, but with it Giffords included an op-ed she had written that was published in the New York Time on April 17, 2013. In that article she expressed her disgust at the Senators who blocked “common-sense legislation that would have made it harder for criminals and people with dangerous mental illnesses to get hold of deadly firearms.” In yesterday's email, she said her 2013 article “is as relevant now as it was on that day.” She writes,

Some of the senators who voted against the background-check amendments have met with grieving parents whose children were murdered at Sandy Hook, in Newtown. Some of the senators who voted no have also looked into my eyes as I talked about my experience being shot in the head at point-blank range in suburban Tucson two years ago, and expressed sympathy for the 18 other people shot besides me, 6 of whom died. These senators have heard from their constituents -- who polls show overwhelmingly favored expanding background checks. And still these senators decided to do nothing. Shame on them.

Giffords is not radical. I think she is a gun owner herself. So when legislators listen to her tell her story and then vote no, I think she is right when she says that senators “fear the NRA and the gun lobby.” There is something wrong when a few gun deaths by terrorists is a huge issue and the rest of the thousands of gun deaths are not. Time to send a little money and take some of the actions recommended at their site.

What You Don't Know

My friend Lisa writes about getting new high tech contact lenses that do much to alleviate an eye condition she has long suffered from.  I especially like this paragraph.

My new clarity isn’t all about 20/20 vision. It’s also about realizing that no one knew, those months and years, how frustrated I was at my poor vision and how often my eyes hurt and how many times I debated, knowing that removing the old lenses would immediately relieve the irritation but also reduce my already poor vision even more. And mostly my new found clarity is about realizing that probably everyone I meet has some hidden pain or challenge that others rarely or ever know.

6:30 Mass

From approximately nine years old through high school, I often attended 6:30 weekday mass with one of my parents. I don't remember liking it or  making a choice about going, but I didn't hate it either.  I remember how dark it was in winter and how cold my legs would be in my school dresses.  I love this account below.  Some of it puts words to my memory, some doesn't.

Communion
By Lawrence Kessenich

During Lent, season of discipline,
I drag myself early out of bed, ride
to Mass with Mom and Mrs. Crivello,
warm in the front seat between their
woolen coats, soothed by familiar perfume.

Headlights carve the ebony darkness.
The women talk in low tones
about people I don’t know, the thrum
of their voices reassuring. I doze
for seconds that seem like minutes.

In the half-acre lot, we park among
a small band of cars huddled near
the entrance of St. Monica’s. Inside,
stained glass windows, a feast of color
in daylight, are black. The church is barn-cold.

Candles burn, bells ring, prayers are murmured,
songs sung. The church warms slowly. I sit,
stand, kneel between the two women,
rituals washing over me like soft waves
on Lake Michigan in August.

Later, I carry the sacred mood
out on my route, dispensing papers
like Communion to my neighbors.

“Communion” by Lawrence Kessenich from Age of Wonders. © Big Table Publishing, 2016. 
You can order that book here and others at Amazon.

Practicing Patience

I posted the above video in earlier in December. It seems connected to so many experiences. Recently, I had a difficult conversation with a person who seemed very angry with me. When I went to bed that night, I just kept thinking about the conversation. My thoughts seemed out of control. The old, “I said and then she said,” blah, blah, blah, on and on.

The next day, I had a little better control of my mind. I stopped much of the thinking and just tried to be aware of what I was feeling. It turns out, in this case, experiencing my hurt feelings was much more comfortable than replaying my thoughts. This experience provided just a little piece of information to tuck away about how to deal with painful thoughts.

Voting Advice

From Ta-Nehisi Coates...

...In the American system of government, refusing to vote for the less-than-ideal is a vote for something much worse. Even when you don’t choose, you choose. But you can choose with your skepticism fully intact. You can choose in full awareness of the insufficiency of your options... 

An American Export

Iain Overton (author of The way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey into the World of Firearms, explains some of the global implications of America's gun culture:

The right to bear arms, and the sheer number of firearms bought and sold in this country every year as a result, has undeniable global implications. For a start, Americans in effect support the world's gun economy. In addition to the 8.6 million guns made in the U.S. in 2012, 4.8 million more were imported from overseas. The U.S. import volume of foreign guns more than tripled between 2003 and 2012.

More insidious, though, is how the licit American gun industry affects the illicit Latin American gun market. The ease with which guns can be purchased in the U.S., and the fact that many sales may be conducted without background checks, has deep consequences. The majority of guns found in Mexico and Central America are from the United States. It is estimated that more than 250,000 guns flow south of the border into Mexico — a country with just one official gun retailer — every year. Roughly 45% of U.S. firearms licensees are believed to rely on Mexican trade for their survival. To the north, Canada estimates that 50% of the guns used in crime in Ottawa were smuggled across the border.

In 2014, El Salvador had almost 4,000 killings, a rate of about 62 homicides per 100,000 (in the U.S. it is about 4 per 100,000). Most of these slayings were committed with guns — and about 50% of guns traced in El Salvador that year came from the United States. The lifting of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban in the U.S. in 2004 resulted in more than 2,600 estimated additional homicides in Mexico.

Hmmm...

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” —E.L. Doctorow

“In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.” —Denise Levertov 

“Writing is…that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.” —Pico Iyer

From The Writer's Almanac 

About WW II

Curiosity

“Donald Trump is criminally uncurious.” (Mark Shields)

 I was surprised to hear this unusual criticism of Mr. Trump, but I appreciate the sentiment. I usually appreciate curiosity, and I am reminded that I could stand to be a bit more curious myself.

American Values

Ted Cruz suggested that we “empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.” 

The NY Police Department Commissioner responded with this:

 I would remind the Senator he lives in the United States of America. We don’t need a President that doesn’t respect the values that form the foundation of this country. There are more than nine hundred Muslim officers in the N.Y.P.D., many of whom also serve in the U.S. military in combat—something that Cruz has never done, so the Senator basically is really out of line with his comments.”

From "Bad Choices" by Amy Davidson in The New Yorker

Quotation of the Day

From Kevin Drum...

That's life. In politics, you're always wrong according to everyone who's not you—and the more extreme you get, the wronger you are. That's the price of being in the arena, or even just being a spectator cheering against the Romans.