London Calling

That thing that is often called the sun appears to be visible today, so I will try to bike my ass off, orbiting Regent’s park numerous times, I’m sure, and possibly biking the roads the surround Primrose Hill park as well. Maybe I’ll make it down to Hyde Park, but my last ride there wasn’t worth the trouble of risking my life on trafficky streets. As I also have a flat tire, I’ll have to boogie on over to Camden and get it fixed.

In September, I am scheduled for a charity ride from London to Paris, so I do need to get into shape for that, riding 60 miles a day for 4 or 5 days. That will be nice, if I can do it: Riding through small towns in France and connecting my sense of place and geography between London and Paris. I will certainly fill in many details of my mental map.

Interestingly, that ‘mapping’ has been important to me, though I don’t know why. Wherever I go or stay for a while, I tend to look it up on a map afterward and understand how that place relates to other places nearby I may have been. The ultimate goal is to begin to knit these experiences into a larger map.

Coming to the UK and Europe two years ago, this was a low-level goal of mine. No, not to map all of Europe, but perhaps to have enough of a map that I could begin to sense the greater picture, and begin to (accruately) imagine how to get around. That is one practical goal for building maps, but there’s another. I think that on a deeper level we tend to relate our daily experiences to stuff we have seen and already internalized; our internal grid so to speak. In my travels and mapping, I was hoping to establish a deeper and different grid on which to map my future experiences. And this, as a slow but steady means of transformation and moving away from the ‘me’ that has guided my actions all of my life. In other words, to become a new person, or at least a freer one.

So by riding my bike I am becoming a new person.