I Biked Yesterday. Where's My Medal?
Last night, instead of running on the treadmill, I rode a stationary bike. I know, big fucking deal. The thing is, I loathe the stationary bike. For some reason, I never incorporate it into my workout routine and unless it’s the only option I have, I almost always choose something else. So while I don’t exactly deserve a Purple Heart for climbing on top of the damn thing and pedaling for half an hour, it was a grueling and trying personal sacrifice.
Some of that is hyperbolic, but not as much as you’d think.
The reason why riding the bike last night was immediately significant is because too often I get stuck in ruts. I spend more time polishing the marble of a sculpture of self instead of focusing on the fact that the piece still needs more chiseling. (I’m not talking about my physique alone, though the metaphor is still apt for that.)
In the years immediately following college, I was still willing to try new things and try on new personalities, styles, etc. This lasted pretty much through my twenties. Toward the end of my third decade on this planet, though, I started feeling like my identity needed to be stable, secure and static.
To a certain degree, I think it’s both natural and healthy to start identifying who you are, what you want out of life, and so forth. Where it becomes a problem—at least for me—is when those ideas and decisions start to make the world seem like it’s contracting and constrictive. Routines can be useful, but they can also be restricting. Every now and then, it’s worthwhile to jump onto the stationary bike and put in a workout that way.
Immediately after I got off the machine, I knew this to be true: even though I run pretty regularly, all sorts of new different muscles were immediately tight and burning. Those muscles that were ignored, those are like the parts of your brain that go unused when life starts to resemble a hamster wheel a little too closely.
There’s a new movie coming out with Scarlett Johansson that looks basically like The Matrix with a female protagonist. It poses the age-old question of what is possible if we used 100% of our brains? Maybe that’s not literally an age-old question, but since the first scientist determined that we only use about 10%, people have been intrigued by what our individual ceilings might be.
I don’t think that I’m alone in getting stuck in ruts or wanting to stay in lanes. This is basically how the world works, and why Renaissance men (and women) fascinate us so much. I used to fancy myself one of those back in the day, and somewhere along the road I decided to zero in on the skills and life choices that appeared to be most profitable. Again, this might just be growing up, but if I’m not alone in this, it’s almost certainly the reason why we need to climb onto new workout machines and entertain ourselves with a glimmering world that exists beyond the chain-link fences that wrangle in our everyday selves.
