JD and I finally motivated to ride around 6 p.m. yesterday. We pedaled slowly down the bike path, then slowly through the heart of NoHo, then slowly past the edge of town onto what’s know around here as “the usual loop.”

As we turned onto the footbridge over the Mill River, I paused to watch this guy cast. I’ve never seen someone fly fish before, and his motion was fluid and smooth, slow with a deliberate flick. The line seemed impossibly long to control, yet the arch graceful pinged the water perfectly each time. I stood watching him for a bit--I think I made him nervous--then we continued on our slow way home.

It was nice to ride slowly. Would I be a bad person to admit I usually hate riding slowly. Hate it. Hate it. Hate it. It’s like the corpse pose at the end of yoga--instead of allowing myself to relax, I’m always making lists of things I should be doing instead of corpse posing or riding slowly. It’s hard, sometimes, to step back and relax and live the moment instead of planning tomorrow’s moment which you won’t live either because you’ll be planning the weekend’s moments and blah and blah and blah.

Maybe we don’t like to give ourselves time to relax because if we do it may open the doors to casting about for answers to the big questions: what is my purpose in life? what mark will i leave on the world? who am I and what do I stand for?

I asked my students to write their “self” story this week. To tell me who they are, right now. It was, they claim, the hardest assignment they had all year. I rejected all the ones that started with , “My name is Blah and I’m 17, and I go to Blah High School,” because that’s not who they really are. They casted about quite a bit looking for the “answer,” and I had to giggle a bit when I overheard one ask her friend, “No, seriously, tell me who I am.”

Okay--time to head into the woods, avoid the black flies, flow some dirt, and figure out who I am.

xo

m