Tag: staying alive

Happy cycling EveryNow ~

One of the most valuable things about bicycle riding is that it gives masses of personal choice.

The range of choice is vast.

I can decide how carefully I oil, clean and maintain my bike. I can decide what clothing and additional gear to use for the road and weather conditions.

When to begin, where to go, what speed or effort I input, how quick or slow, when to pause, or take a random detour, and where and when to end my ride. It’s all up to me, only me.

What most excites and occupies my attention, and hardly applies at all to everyday routine, is STAYING ALIVE.

When I am downed and I die playing a computer game, I regenerate and continue on carefree for as long as I like.

When out riding, I actively choose to live to ride another day.

Every metre of the way is the object of highly pleasurable, intense, tunnel vision concentration.

What is my wheel doing in relation to my chosen line of travel? What decisions do I need to make in various distance and time frames based on anticipatory riding? What are other highway users doing? More to the point, what are they likely to be doing up to and beyond normal expectations, which might affect what my bike and I are and will be doing?

My version of anticipatory riding imagines the scene of my own violent death every few metres. What I do right now involves my scanning all possible scenarios and strategies, from ordinary to extreme, to avoid getting snared in such a grisly disaster.

I will usually engage in this mental theatre of horrors before I saddle up. This is how I install and set up my personal life assurance policy for the trip ahead. Even if the weather is mild, I will wear something warm to help delay the onset of shock while lying in the road till help arrives.

Oh, and for life savers, I use my referee’s whistle dangling from my crash helmet. It clears traffic and pedestrians out of my path.

I remember to cast my Look Of Life. This vital head-turn reminds the driver behind that a person is in their controlled area.

And as I go, I paint on my face an expression that reads, “Heavily Armoured No Compromise”.

https://www.godchecker.com/indonesian-mythology/BATARA-KALA/

BATARA KALA

Infused with love

Infused with love, like tea in boiling water

Samuel Johnson’s dictum occurs to me. ‘When you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life’.

What the Great Fellow glossed over is that he assumed that we all receive life’s enjoyments as gifts from the external world – in his example it was London life.

Nowadays I can’t conceive of any momentary experience not enhanced by some sort of learning curve, all the way through my life to the end.

I ask you this.

What characterises a person who is constantly expecting to learn new things on the road, and is more often than not ambushed by the surprising amount of all the stuff available to learn on the way, provided that all senses are prepped and receptive?

One answer is a person such as this has to be in the condition of a serenely untroubled and always available openness. Also, there must be an absence of externally conditioned, self-obstructing barriers to a cat-like curiosity.

It is a wild open, wide open alertness, a feral immediacy of awareness of sensory input, unfiltered by intellect, which is largely responsible for bringing me, my heart and my sacred spaces into contact with the EveryNow.

By now, after years of redirected attention to the minutiae of detail and to the absence of tme in which details bathe, I have the capacity to hurl my awareness in there pretty much on demand.

I’m on foot, intent on my way to the bus stop, I’m looking intently out of a car window, I’m bicycling and I focus my intention on keeping upright, uninjured, staying alive.

These are some examples of the sweeping nature of the changes that I have been overtaken by these last few years, since 2013, the Year of my Life.

By self-discipline over a period of years, by making self-conscious choices in the words I choose and in what I choose to do, the most precious thing I seem have acquired is a lack!

I lack the overlay or inlay of concept, of internally verbalised labels at the point at which my senses interface with objects in the world. Think “cat”.

I have been regularly making choices – namely choosing in the first instant to tune in to the Thisness of things. The closer to Thisness, the more the love. My motivation to exercise this intensity of unblinkered enquiry has become habitual through a self-reinforcing positive feedback.

And how amazing is this “feedback” !

If I strive to melt Peter the Pilley away in order to let the fly, the flower, the star, the shining soul-light of my friend assume the entire arena of my awareness, what then?

What happens?

What is happening, with no reasons asked or given, no frown of reasoning, no intervening rationalisation obscuring the way, is that I am infused, like tea in boiling water, with love.

This is love, as axiomatic as the sun’s atomic heat, where the object of love and love itse blends into one and the same. Love and the object of love indistinguishably the same.

The essential truth, the nature, the living-beingness of everything is love. Oh, and peace-in-perpetual-motion as well, but more of that another time.

~ Love is present EveryNow