Charlie's Got A Brand New Bag

Setting the Stage

First, channel James Brown, specifically - "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag":

Then instead of fly dance moves from back in the day - think bicycles.

Charlie

My darling, he's old, he's Austrian, there's no one like him - he is a bicycle. We've gone more than eight thousand miles together over the past two and a half years. Late last summer I took him apart because he looked like this once the cranks came off. He needed to be cleaned.

He needed a new chainring and a few other things.

And he's been waiting.

Mercutio's become the winter bike, he's aluminum so I'm not so worried about the road salt eating him alive, whereas a couple of winters have tried their hands at Charlie's steel. (Princess Buttercup does not come out when there is road salt, she's too fancy for that.)

So Charlie has waited patiently, but now Charlie's getting a brand new bag.

Compliments of the most excellent idea of one of my roommates, we are taking the wheel building class at Broadway Bicycle School. Charlie's fly new wheelset, made by yours truly includes a lovely White Industries track hubset laced to H Plus Son Archetype rims.

Charlie's getting rebuilt, just like me.

Last year brought a lot of change, and fall brought some more. I always used to think that you had to take what was handed to you and deal with it, but it doesn't have to be like that.

Building Anew

You can build yourself anew. And I'm doing that with life, and I'm doing that for Charlie. The bicycle of my personal awakening, of making me into a cyclist, deserves that. But even outside of anthropomorphizing my bike, people deserve that too.

You, me, and all the folks out there.

Some words I continually come back to:

"Indulgence and indolence produce nothing creative. Complaints and evasions reflect a cowardly spirit; they corrupt and undermine life's natural creative thrust. When life is denuded of the will to struggle creatively, it sinks into a state of hellish destructiveness directed at all that lives.

Never for an instant forget the effort to renew your life, to build yourself anew. Creativity means to push open the heavy, groaning doorway of life itself. This is not an easy task. Indeed, it may be the most severely challenging struggle there is. For opening the door to your own life is in the end more difficult than opening the door to all the mysteries of the universe.

But to do so is to vindicate your existence as human beings. Even more, it is the mode of existence that is authentically attuned to the innermost truths of life itself; it makes us worthy of the gift of life.

There is no way of life more desolate or more pitiful than one of ignorance of the fundamental joy that issues from the struggle to generate and regenerate one's own life from within. To be human is much more than the mere biological facts of standing erect and exercising reason and intelligence. The full and genuine meaning of our humanity is found in tapping the creative fonts of life itself."   -Daisaku Ikeda, from "The Flowering of Creative Life Force"

Building Mercutio taught me a lot about the mistaken delusions of perfectionism; Charlie is teaching me how to rebuild and start again, all over again.

Come spring, we'll be rolling by - renewed, refreshed, rebuilt, and ready for anything.

What It Means to Be Human

I attended a most interesting talk on quantum computing (and a mess of other things) by a noted professor of MIT in December (in a pub). (Hat-tip to the Bandit Man for this suggestion.)

Besides sending photons back in time and qubits and such, there was of course talk of parallel dimensions and alien life, the sort of thing often reserved for science fiction. This combined with a recent conversation sent my mind to wandering, here's a paraphrase and a bit of a tangent....

Rodenberry's Vision and My Childhood in Spaceships

I've always loved science fiction. Some lovers of literature and other genres don't quite understand why. It is often seen as some sort escapism. But for those of us who love science fiction, many of us love it because of its power to show us what it means to be human. We seem to have to take a step outside of ourselves to truly understand what it is to be exactly human. To answer, "what really is alien?"; we must look at ourselves and ask "what is it that is truly human?".

And there's more to it than just fiction or our best stories. Beings that are at once perhaps either supernatural, alien, fantastical, or godly in our stories are removed from the human experience by this otherness. They are not human, yet interact with a human world on a human scope (or near), close enough that we can still relate to the story. It could be argued that stories have to be relate-able on some scale in order to move us. (And probably has been long before this musing...)

Growing up I always loved watching Star Trek: Next Generation, and while there were crystalline entities, the godlike Q, energy forms, the Borg, and androids, so many of the races met on the Enterprise were humanoid. And while we might argue that from a special effects budget perspective it makes more sense to slap makeup on some actors, I think Gene Rodenberry's vision was deeper than that. That somehow we must often have the mirage of humanity in order to relate to the stories at all.

I don't think that the probability of (or incredible improbability of) parallel (or convergent) evolution producing unrelated-yet-humanoid life forms all around the cosmos was Rodenberry's point; or the appearance of so many Earth-like (M class) planets either. Those may have helped with not needing space suits in every script. So much of what we have observed in the heavens from our own local star system to exo-planets does not point to the prevalence of human-life-friendly-type-worlds that abound in the realms of science fiction. These observations do not seem to support his hopeful view. But once again I think this link to humanity, in an ecological-story-setting sense, makes for better story telling.

And so we move from a story telling style of a great alliance of planets, The Federation, governed by a Prime Directive, to an even more intimate story telling methodology: the individual.

Doctor, Archetype, Hero?

Coming out of a recent conversation about Doctor Who, came a discussion as the Doctor's function as a hero of the individual. (I've seen just about every episode, even on back to the black and white ones from the '60s all the way to the present revamped version.) He represents the freedom of the individual in a cosmos of standardized, emotionless, conformist, conquest-driven military societies and races. Not all Who nemeses are like this, but the favorite and timeless enemies of the Doctor; e.g. Cyberman, Daleks; demonstrate this behavior. Even the Time Lords themselves, his own people, were strict and hands-off when it came to matters of time travel and space happenings. The Doctor himself is antithetical to their philosophy. He stole a TARDIS and travels anywhere and any-when in space and time without regards to the Time Lord structure and rules. (If he was subject to the parameters of Star Trek's Prime Directive, he would have been a very, very bad boy.)

And in his seeming humanity, in both appearance and mannerisms, he reminds those he encounters of the human race what it is to be human. He encourages them to move beyond freaking out or giving up when the going gets tough to remembering how they got there in the first place: through uniquely human brilliance, creativity, determination and teamwork. He remembers humanity when we forget ourselves and so reminds us. All the while constantly having to remind humans that he is not himself human.

Aliens are so frequently saying how weak, how destructive humans are across the films, tv shows, and books I have encountered.

Is that how we see ourselves? Or is that how we're challenging ourselves not to see ourselves?

Us, Ordinary People

I want to consider for a moment a role the Doctor plays in the lives of so many people who encounter him. He serves to wake people up to the wonder that is the universe in which we live, to the profundity of the nature of the life of the ordinary person. More so in the story lines of recent years, he constantly voices that there is no individual more important and significant in time and space than the ordinary person.

The great storytelling that has sustained my love of this genre, long past when it was only the forceful insistence of my elder brother than began it, shows with such lucidity; and often in a very uncomfortable way, just what our behavior as human beings looks like outside the norms of our today. Outside our usual days, objects, transit options, and interactions it is easier to see exactly what sort of cruel and generous, destructive and altruistic creatures we are. And this is all from fellow story tellers of our own species.


Look Beneath the Surface

Science fiction looks from the lens of the outside and can teach us much. But true and lasting change comes from within, so we must see ourselves as we are, here and now. We must awaken, and there isn't going to necessarily be a goofy alien time traveling rebel to help us wake up. It's the choices we make now - it is a choice to open our eyes and see.

The choice to wake up or not - the whole point of Buddhism in my understanding is to impact our daily lives on an immensely positive scale so that we can then engender a positive change in society at large - ultimately so that humanism is the common sense of the era. Buddhism issues this challenge to look beneath the surface, to face the current situation for exactly what it is, to transform our present truth into that seemingly ephemeral better tomorrow.

And the best prescription to see what's really here means going out there and getting a bit messy. That's what the Doctor excels at. And a bicycle can be that lens from inside the present - you don't get to hide behind technology here:  face to the wind, it's you and the road and the people and the city and the world. In your face. In real time. Eye to eye. The real human experience.

A bicycle can tell us a lot about humanity when we look at how we treat our most human forms of transit. All this in the nitty gritty present, not a far-off world, an alternate dimension, or life form we've never seen. This is every day people, those folks we pass and know and don't know and love and hate and ignore and greet...  our species.

And maybe this bicycle is the vehicle of change too.

My bicycle may have modern components, but it is a time machine. And yes bicycles aren't spaceships. But I think the people who dare to ride them are heroes. Every day, ordinary heroes. It's a simple thing, this bicycle. It doesn't have a warp core, it can't make the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs, as Han Solo says. But it challenges the way we move, the way we think in this ordinary world that is so amazing.

On a bike you have to look people in the face. You can't hide the humanity of this thing, because it has no real life without a person to make it move.

A bike helped wake up my life, and it's helping my city wake up - maybe even the world.

But what can a bike teach us about being human? Sure I pedal and it goes...but there's more...

My bicycle allows me to confront myself by revealing my behavior as a human being. I don't need a space ship or a time machine to show me what the reality is of being human today.** My human powered transit can teach me that. Humanism on wheels = bicycle. If we ignore our human transit we're ignoring an essential part of us. And just as people who don't introspect and face themselves head on don't grow - how can we? Our treatment of our cyclists can tell us a lot about where we are as human beings right now.

Will we listen? Will we take action?




____ ** But I don't mind the idea of a TARDIS:)

No Excuses

"I can't, I just can't.  Because of all these things (insert variables, x, y, z, q) I just can't. And that's all there is to it.  I can't and so you must.  You must do this because I am unable."

How many times and in how many places have we heard this?  It comes in many flavors too...

...Sometimes it's uplifting: Yoda cannot bring back the Jedi because his time is through, and so it falls to Luke.  

... Sometimes it's a bit irrational: A dear friend who is afraid of spiders will not enter a room where one is present if she can observe it or knows about it until it is removed.

... Sometimes it's defeat: Something is hard enough that you can't do it right the first time, and so give up.

We learn in life, in books, in songs, in Buddhism, and - of course - in bicycles that victory comes in many forms.  If I had stopped riding just because Gus (my old bike) broke, or Charlie would get flats that I couldn't fix (or any other manner or repair), or it rained or I got lost - then life would not look like what it looks like today.  I would not be me.  In these, as in so many things, sometimes perseverance is in and of itself the victory.  We keep riding, we keep going, because we must, because to give up is to admit defeat - and defeated people don't ride.  

Victory may not be standing at a podium with a medal around your neck, cameras blazing while you give a speech, or receive some delightful recognition.  Victory may be that you just pick yourself up and try again, and again and again, until finally something goes right.  Never give up.

It hurts my heart when someone talks this way through the lens of defeat, of fear, of giving up.  There's so much more to us than defeat.  

Hemingway writes in the The Old Man and the Sea; "But man is not made for defeat.  A man can be destroyed but not defeated."

Just because it doesn't work out the way you wanted, or on the first try, or it seems so easy for others while it is so difficult for you doesn't mean you can't; it just means you have to try harder.  I have invited myself to live a life of no excuses; I will stop with reasons why I can't and instead redetermine - however many times it takes, to do it and know in my heart I've won.

So I broke a chair

Broken Chair 

On Monday evening, whilst having the most delightful chat with my roommate, the chair I was sitting in suddenly broke right out from under me. Smush. Bottom hits the floor in mid-sentence, I am uninjured and mostly just surprised.

And no, while this blog has had some downtime, I haven't turned into a whale, I don't think that that is why the chair broke. These chairs have lived in several apartments and have had several owners. They are much used and loved, and much repaired. It really wasn't much of a surprise that this one broke. (The others may be soon to follow, we expect.)

It just had to happen right then.

More Than Just a Chair 

This chair breaking out of the blue is like the changes that have happened in my life of late. A sharp shock, but there's more to it than that. This chair breaking means there's not enough at the table now -  change is coming. The chair is beyond repair, so whatever comes next is going to be very different from the other furniture. Or maybe it's time for something entirely new (to us)?

The things we base our daily lives on, and base our daily lives around, become staples. Become a foundation upon which we build other things. We can take them for granted. Chairs are one of those things, we don't expect them to break. So this broken chair, these life changes, can be a surprising and uncomfortable shock as best, injuring at worst.

But someone lends a hand, and helps pull you to your feet. You learn to laugh at yourself in the face of your damaged pride. We keep growing. We learn to have gratitude for what was, for what has supported us, and we move onward. (This is one profound chair, but my parallels leave something to be desired.)


Changes on this site aren't complete yet, but coming - some things you cannot foresee to plan around...
 

A Brief Pause

Good day! Main blog content will be down temporarily for a few updates and changes! Check back soon!

Will be back up in a couple of days.

We leave you with some goodies from the old days to hold you over.

In My Father's Shoes, or Pedals Rather

File Under:  Beyond Biking

On Saturday I biked 60 miles from where I live in Somerville, MA to my hometown -  a rural town in central Massachusetts. I had never undertaken such a solo mission before and I'll be writing more about that adventure in it's own post.

But I biked all these miles in my father's pedals. My first bike ride to my childhood home, carried on a piece of memory, carries significance for me.

As if I have come into my cycling inheritance.

History Lessons

My first bike, the very first one, the one with the training wheels, came in the mail, in a box, in a million pieces. My father built it up. We sat on the porch while he put it together. It was white, with streamers, sparkles, and had a top tube protector with unicorns. It was the most ridiculous bicycle ever.

My dad spent a lot of time with me and that bike. Around the age of seven I still had training wheels, and as it came time to take them off - I fell again and again. I had grown dependent upon them. But Dad didn't give up. And it wasn't until I had fallen down more times than I could count and cried and flailed and said that I was done with bikes forever that he did not push me any further.

For the next three years my friends and cousins learned to ride without training wheels. I refused to try. I would run along with the bikes, which made me a fast runner but I was ashamed of myself and my failure. Over these years I also took up horseback riding.

Then It Happened

Fast forward to the age of 10, and one day in late fall I thought to myself, I haven't tried a bike in awhile, I wonder what would happen if I just got on? I can ride horses, maybe I can ride a bike now... Fully prepared to fall and bite the dust, donning my horseback riding helmet - I got on a bike. And I rode.

Yes, I was wobbly, but I didn't fall. And I kept going. Soon I was biking everywhere. I biked constantly and well on into my teen years, up until driving became a priority, and on even after that. I didn't bike in college, although I often considered it. It wasn't until I moved off-campus in my final year that the cycling bug bit again and I've been urban cycling ever since.

Connect the Dots

My father passed away when I was twelve, so there were a lot of things about him that I didn't get to learn. Anecdotes and found objects have helped me to fill in the pieces of the man I only sort of got to know. And it was only about two years ago that I learned how my dad was a cyclist.

We always had sheds and out buildings filled with bicycles growing up, so I should have guessed - but I thought that that was normal. Everything from vintage step through frame bikes to vintage road bikes to racing bikes (but no mountain bikes) dwelled in our sheds.

When you got too tall for one bike, there was no necessary trip to a shop - there were probably already several to choose from on the premises  Tire flat? Wheel out of true? Derailleur not working? No problem, those where easy for him to fix. Other people gave him bikes they didn't want anymore and he fixed them.

All this bicycle-ness was completely normal for me growing up. My uncle, an auto body pro, would paint my cousins - his daughters' - bikes in the most fantastic ways - anything we wanted. Sparkles. Unicorns. Pastel. Fluorescent. Bikes were an intrinsic part of life. My sister, who knew how to ride, but opted not to was always a mystery to me.

The dreams of little girls

Bicycles were the horses for my imagination. We couldn't have horses when I was young, but I took lessons and rode in shows. And because I couldn't have my own horse, and my similarly 'afflicted' cousins (who lived down the street) couldn't either, the bicycles became our horses.

We would ride for hours and hours, our imaginations would fill in the storylines.

After my father passed away I kept biking. I did eventually become a horse owner as a teenager and even rode competitively in college. When I was in college my family gave away all the bikes left from my Dad's time. I was the only biker, and yet not.

Fast Forward to November 2010

The year before last while the entire family embarked on emptying out the attic of the old farmhouse, I found a wheel set, an old wheel set - one my father had built. Amongst the hodgepodge, from an unlabeled box with a hole in it peeked bicycle things. Still coming into my own as a cyclist I didn't recognize all the tools or components in that box but I knew it for what it was: bike guts.

Later, as I dug through the box I got a snapshot of another chapter of my father's life. A time dedicated to cycling and building bikes. Before he met my mom.

I was shocked and elated.

Heritage

I learned through research and asking at shops more about the components left in that box. And my Dad did not skimp on those parts, all were of top-of-the-line European and Japanese manufacture from the late '70s. Amongst them were a hex wrench set, another wrench set, a chain breaker, all of which I still use, and a set of pedals with clips (aka toe baskets).

At the time I only had one bike, and Charlie's pedals were fine, so the pedals sat in my pile of spare parts.

Cycling Inheritance

Over this past summer, as I've entered the cycling industry I now have three bikes. One of them is a yellow Bianchi Veloce named Bumblebee (or on occasion she goes by Princess Buttercup, she's rather girly). She came into my life used, but equipped with clipless pedals for which I did not have the shoes (nor at that point wished to acquire said type of shoe).

So I thought to put on these pedals of my father's, to finally put them to use. They are vintage Mikashima keirin approved pedals with clips. They go nicely on the Bianchi with Campagnolo group-set situation that Bumblebee has.

But more so than that they are a piece of something greater. They represent a piece of something shared between those who cannot be together.

So, I may never have a chance to go on a bike ride like this with my Dad, but I somehow inherited his love of cycling. (Not just that but also his penchant for pretty components and very long rides (my aunt recently told a story of his bike ride to Cape Cod, but that's for another time).)

Somehow, despite life changes, distance, and so many other variables - I have become a cyclist of my own accord, just like my Dad. As I embraced my solo trek from my present to my past, I rode on my father's pedals.

I guess there's more in common than I have ever known.

Connections last across generations and distances and those we love are never far away because they're a part of us. As my dear friend has lost her father recently, I offer this up as a small anecdote that small things go a long way; and it's what we do with what we carry in our hearts after the fact that determines the future.

The Scariest Thing You'll Ever Face: Yourself

File Under: Breaking the Limits

I'm giving up on giving up. I've decided. I've had it with fear, doubt, and disillusionment. These things were cool when I was watched Reality Bites, long before I went to college and started living on my own, long before life got hard. (Life was never exactly easy, but this is before it got difficult as a direct effect of my own actions, or actions in this lifetime (if you're into that sort of thing).) Back then identifying with the disillusionment was enough, there really didn't need to be anything on the other end of those emotions. I was the disillusionment.

I've got a counter-force brace on my right arm, supporting my busted elbow (micro-tears in the tendon) from my Tough Mudder. I've got bone bruises on my patellas (aka knee caps), abrasions, strained tendons in my knees, ankles and feet that keep swelling up at the most inopportune moments. I've got bruises everywhere. (And a nasty burn on my arm from baking a cake.) And a smile on my face.

Why would this make me smile? I'm not a masochist. I'm also already signed up for a Rebel Race in 2 weeks and another Tough Mudder in May. No, I don't think I'm insane either.

Battered by Sandy

I imagine those much more intensely effected by this hurricane than I may feel something like this:

Everything hurts in here, it hurts in my heart. Everything is gone. And I'm so angry at this situation, and it keeps coming out at everyone else. Am I angry at myself? Or the world? This whole situation sucks.

Just don't give up, as soon as we give up the growing stops. The healing stops.

There's a story of a man, Devadatta, in the Lotus Sutra and elsewhere. So the story goes, this man - a relative of Siddhartha, an exemplary practitioner, gave way to jealousy, scheming and greed. Convinced the king to kill his father and usurp the throne. Tried to kill the Buddha and take over the community. But all of this grew out of his giving up his own internal struggle, really.

It hurts so much, but keep going. I keep throwing myself headlong into these challenges because I want to try, I want to challenge myself in a big way not to give up. Look my doubts square in the face, and win.

Outside In

One reason I did the Tough Mudder was because I was sick of looking at my life from the outside in, judging my success in any endeavor by someone else, or what I thought someone else thought of me. Even by this age and amount of living I know better, yet the propensity arises from time to time, and lately more than I'd like.

I here endeavor to be completely honest with myself, even if I don't like what I see. Even if I'm stuck doing things that I don't want to do. It's the only way forward. The Mudder was mine, and mine alone. I certainly wasn't alone at all in the doing of it, before or after - but the confrontation of the self was mine.

That Devadatta fellow I mentioned before - he was all about external appearances, all about being in charge of everything for his own glory. There was none of the introspection, the struggle to find that sometime-ephemeral sense of having a unique mission in life that requires so much work. I don't want to be that person.

Doubt, self-deprecation, self-begrudging come from the same place as arrogance. They come from a place where our outsides determine the innermost truth of our heart. It is place that has no respect for the inherent worth of each individual, because from this perspective the individual only has worth in regards to the outside.

There is no inner growth here.

Dangerous Buzz Words

"The faith that can change destiny cannot be carried out easily. Must not doubt. The fundamental cause lies in my own determination and faith.

"I have a mission. Without a mission, a Bodhisattva of the Earth has no reason to exist. Human beings must never forget their mission. Since this is the case, my only choice is to courageously carry out powerful, unyielding, indomitable faith."  Oct 10, 195? Daisaku Ikeda, A Youthful Diary

Faith is a dangerous word, full of all sorts of connotations. But here I use it to mean faith in ourselves; in our own unique capacity; faith in oneself to know that, e.g. I can grow more, be more - being just who I am. (In case you were wondering: Bodhisattvas of the Earth are those who answered the Buddha's call to stick around after his death to continue to lead others to enlightenment on into the future, especially when the eras become rife with strife.)

In training for an event you have a goal - e.g., I will run 12 miles of mud and obstacles and finish successfully. I will ride my bicycle 100 miles in one day. In life - scary big-picture moment here - we have a mission. No one tells you what it is; it's yours alone - yet so intricately connected to everything. Sort of a determining your own destiny thing. But it's also a lot more exhausting than riding hundreds of miles or running tens of miles to discover it. And also, just as exhilarating - probably more so.

Through challenge we grow. We get a chance to seek the profound inside our lives during this existence  We get a chance to write our own definitions, not be told who and what we are from the outside. We get to each discover what our mission is, and for each it is different.

But it means we have to make a choice to do this, a choice for self-determination.

Mudder as Life

I cannot look to another to know my purpose. The mud covered people running next to me, helping to catapult and pull me up and over obstacles, just as I aid them - they cannot tell me either, although we run and struggle together. I would not assign an arbitrary value to any one of them based on their muddiness  because I am just as muddy. But underneath that mud, the person inside is shining. That person is fighting with everything they've got, surmounting obstacles with the help of others and helping others. That person is fighting their own internal battles just as much, even if I cannot see from here.

Each one of us is running this thing for some reason, some internal drive. Some mission we've made for ourselves. This run isn't a competition, it's a challenge. You've got to have some deep personal reason to run it, or you won't finish.

Part of my goal was to do to every obstacle, not to skip any. In a Mudder you can skip an obstacle if you need to - although most don't, but in life the only way out is through.

I'm running through my proverbial mud.

Mission

Dream bigger than what you think is possible, only then will your life begin to approach what you're truly capable of, is a paraphrase from the person I identify as my mentor in life. Well, right now my sense of mission is murky, and I've got dreams that should very well be impossible. But just because I don't have the answer now, and maybe am not yet capable of what I imagine, doesn't mean I can't ever, or won't ever.

The future is farther than the horizon, what is possible is more than what we can see right now. When we give up on giving up, give up on defining ourselves by our current external limitations, the possibilities open wide, and the only limit is our own vision.

You might have noticed by now, inside our innermost beings, there are no limitations.

Herein is an existence that does not require the outside to exude joy. Never giving up means it doesn't matter how muddy my outsides get, I am not defeated, I am not destroyed - no matter how bad the getting goes.

And that's where this smile comes from.