They always say you only need to learn to ride a bike once.  Thinking that this was accurate I strapped on my helmet, grabbed the old bike that had been sitting at my parents house unused for a good ten years, and set off to go over to one of the coffee shops near campus.  Now, to be clear, to get there I’d have to cross at least four main roads, riding along at least one of them, and cross one of two quite extensive bridges, one of which has wide sidewalks but narrow lanes and the other having narrow sidewalks but wider lanes.

This is evidence of a peculiar plague that has haunted me for years. What exists in my head is completely contrary to the processes of…what is it called–ah yes, acting!  Actually doing stuff is a lot different than thinking about doing them. May sound incredibly odd but believe it or not, I do seem to have a problem with that.

I do not know how to ride a bike. I figured this one out about the time I almost stumbled into State St. I was awkward, clumsy, and had no idea how to ride a bike on a main road without getting squashed by all of the cars wizzing by. So I retreated, took a deep breath, and rode a few laps around the apartment complex. This made me feel a bit more comfortable so I decided to take a nice loop around the block, up Knox Abbot a bit (the opposition direction of the bridge) and take a nice right turned circle around the area.  This trip made me incredibly glad I didn’t actually attempt to go to a coffee shop.  It was quite enough for one day. I’ll have to work up to the whole riding to campus thing…especially since I actually want to try to ride my bike to school a good bit next semester so I can save on the parking pass (just getting one of the cheap ones that lets you park in the generic lots for rainy days). I am glad I have a few months to prepare…here’s a few things I learned on this bike ride.

1) I do not know how to even use a bike.   The only bike I had when I was younger breaked by backpedaling. Luckily I wasn’t a moron and knew what the handle breaks are. Still getting the feel of the brakes took a bit. The main thing I didn’t know how to use was the gears, which I found to be quite important. Apparently this bike is actually a pretty nice one.  I may not be saying this right but it seems to have 3 gears and 7 speeds….or maybed its 7 gears and 3 speeds. I think thats what they call it. At any rate, I had it on the 1st of the 3 for most of the ride  and couldn’t figure out why the bike was going so slow even when i had the other one on 7.  I almost lost my balance and fell over going somewhat fast down a hill on a neighborhood street because I tried to pedal once on such a low gear and my foot went flying. Yeah…so I figured that one out.

2) You have to make sure your bike is comfortable. First thing I did was try to adjust the seat. I did that before even leaving the complex. But it was still horribly uncomfortable. Maybe I just need to get use to it…but it sure wasn’t very pleasant. I may have to get spend the $30 to get a nice comfortable seat if I’m going to do this.  Turns out biking can be somewhat expensive…

3) Biking works muscles you only use biking.  This is cliche. I should’ve known it. I made it half-way around the block and my thighs were absolutely burning. I had to stop and take a breather, at which point some large dogs decided to bark at me.  Doing this and a full session of yoga today has left me exhausted. I am entirely out of shape. Good news is, it’ll definitely get me into shape. If I alternate between yoga, running, and bike riding I’ll be quite in shape in no time methinks.

4) Riding on main roads is scary and nothing like riding in neighborhoods.  When I was younger there was nowhere to bike to. The neighborhood consisted of four small streets that looked somewhat like an F with an extra prong and the top road making a T. It had wide streets, sidewalks, and only one entrance so there was hardly any traffic. So you could play in the street all you wanted, mozying back and forth across the road with little to fear. But you couldn’t leave the neighborhood because it came out to a narrowest of narrow yet busy road that curved while going down a steep hill and ended in a bridge–probably the most dangerous road ever venture out on. Yeah, so needless to say I never left the neighborhood.  When I came up to State St today it was terrifying. Cars were rushing by, it was noisy, I felt unbalanced. I rode on the sidewalk for quite a ways, even though Knox Abbott has a bike lane. I just couldn’t bear to do it for a good quarter mile…it absolutely terrified me. Finally I felt comfortable enough to go into the bike lane and it was ok. But I will forever treat bicyclists with much more respect while driving.

Yeah, so that about sums it all up. I am incredibly exhausted now and I’ve only been up for four hours (yes…I’ve gotten caught on this late night streak I can’t seem to shake…going to be at 4, waking at 12. Been talking with the roommate a lot and whatnot late into the night). I might have to rethink the whole ride a bike to school thing.  Leaving it at that…I think I’ll go drive to a coffee shop.

As I was laying there in the calm of the end of an hour of yoga (called Savasana), I found myself coming to one word that permeated my entire feeling of existence and my desires for the world: intense.  In a life full of intriguing paradoxes, this one fits all too well. What I was feeling was not just calm, but an intense calm.  Yoga itself, as a practice, although I am quite new to it, seems like an excellent demonstration of the contradicting sense that comes from being at peace in a state of tension.  Each asana (posture), especially in the Ashtanga yoga I am doing, places your body in a position of strain while immersing you in a mental and spiritual calm. Your body is shaking but your mind is at peace. It is an incredible feeling.

The word “intense” differs from “tense” only in that “intense” indicates an immersion in tension.  So while we think of tenseness as a bad thing, intenseness is something different. It is a way of life or being in which life is lived deeply and strongly, with great interest and passion.   Being tense indicates weakness, fear, and anxiety, while being intense indicates passion, love, and excitement. The etymology itself doesn’t work precisely but it is fascinating to think of how we speak of being immersed in tenseness as different than simply being tense.

But I get off topic.  As I was laying there I was thinking about the various sorts of intensity through which people may live there lives. Granted, a lot of people don’t live life very intensely at all. That is fine. Everyone is different.  For me though, living life intensely is not just a matter of preference but a matter of need. For me, to not live intensely is to not live at all.  I have learned this very acutely throughout the years as I’ve played with different lifestyles. Every time I found myself growing passive and complacent I found myself growing unhappy. This led, for a long time, to the somewhat odd conclusion that I actually do not like being happy–that is, that I do not like the vision of peacefull bliss that many people popularly envision as the ideal (sitting on the beach, sipping mai tais and wasting the days away kind of thing). I’d prefer a tulmultous life to that because it allows me to live more intensely.

These past few weeks have taught me a lot, however, about what all this means.  A good month or two ago I realized quite acutely that I had lost my sense of intensity and with it (for they are tied) my sense of wonder and intrigue towards life.  So I knew I had to make changes. For a while I considered the idea of intensity and the life that I wanted to live. I entertained notions that to live intensely was to go all sorts of places, doing all sorts of things, and being completely uprooted from one place.  In many ways, I conflated living intense with living busy. So I’ve entertained the idea that I must choose a path that will make my life incredibly busy, random, and uprooted; hence my apparent decision to try to pursue a career as a writer.

The break-up has provided a new perspective and new questions.  I have begun to question the nature of the life I want to live and what will make me happy.  The question has not been “Why must I live intensely” but rather “What makes my life intense? What provides intensity?  What is required for a life of wonder and intrigue?”  As I was doing yoga today it became clear that I was mistaken about the idea of intensity.  A devoted, passionate, enjoyable life emanates ultimately from within. It doesn’t matter where you are or how busy your life is; you could live a calm life in the country and live quite passionately.  What matter is how much you are immersed in your current experience, appreciate the world around you, and caring about the existence you are occupying.  It became clear that what you are doing and where you are is not so important as how you do it. Or perhaps it would be better to say the way you do it.

You find all sorts of ways of being with this kind of focus. Much of Eastern practices, at least the limited amount I’ve been exposed to, are about achieving intensity in various states. Most martial arts are intense in a very active way. Yoga is intense in a very calm way.  There are many many other equivalents of these things in almost every culture and ideology I am sure, but the basic lesson is the same: I don’t need to run around the world to appreciate life and live intensely. I just need to immerse myself in wherever I am, with whatever I am doing. My whole life I have spent a lot of time looking forward and backwards, never really in the moment, searching for excitement and purpose in what could be or should be.  I found a sort of intensity in that and in being extremely busy. Now, I realize that it is not necessary, not really even desirable for me.  I really think I’m a yoga kind of guy; sit calmly in the turmoil, appreciating it in my intense calm.  I can live with that.

This is the place where I live.  It is 732 square feet for two people. I costs about half of what I make. I live here comfortably with more than enough room to spare. We have carpet. A fridge. A television.  Three computers. There are nice flowers outside.  I own a car. So does my fiance.  

These are slums of Mumbai. There people live in a way that I can only imagine–in a way that I can only gather from small glimpses from things like these pictures or movies like Slumdog Millionare.  Their whole experience of life is completely uttery different from everything I know, from everything I see on a daily basis.   Where I see flowers, they see trash. Where I have T-shirts, they have rags. 

And I am only a college student. This says nothing of the millions of other Americans with far more money than I have now. 

I don’t say these things to make people feel guilty. It is too easy to turn off guilt, to come up with excuses, to forget these pictures as something far away and distant. I say all of this so that I can sit here and think, for a moment, how limited and complacent and sheltered my life is here in America. My whole life I have been told I should be grateful for this great country I live in, that I could be somewhere else where they have much less.  And what do you tell those people sitting there in front of those makeshift shelters they call homes?  What is their life about that is different from mine?  What do I know, what do I see, that they don’t?   

As far as I can tell, our experience here in America is laughable.  What must others think of us? I must know. What is it like to be that? What is it like to struggle for your existence when there are millions of people across the world who expect things you only dream of? And these people, they turn away and forget…and they are grateful for their blessed country and their lucky status. 

What is this life of ours? What are we doing here in these United States? Earlier I wrote about how leaving the country made me realize just how much our lives here in America seems like a little bubble.  Indeed, the more I think about it, the more I see it to be true.  From the time we are children, to the time we die, Americans can have and often do have more than most of these children of these slums dream of having–even some of our poorest.   My question is not even the obvious one (why don’t we help others?). Rather, my question also becomes, what are we missing from our experience here in our bubble of prosperity?

I have never been one to think we should not move forward and advance this world but are our lives in the US truly progress in any social, cultural, or philosophical sense?  What good is wealth if your experience becomes a constant flow of boredom and complacency?  I’ll say much more later on about the conditions of others in foreign countries as I learn and explore more (It is my hope to one day in the future to go and meet and talk to these people). But the first question I would say we need to ask as those of wealthier status is just this: is your life really interesting simply because you are wealthy? Would you life not be more interesting in another form?  That is, is your happiness predicated on your status?  Because that is a miserable thing to base one’s happiness on. 

It seems to me that I would greatly benefit from a varied experience rather than this limited and sheltered one that is the essence of the American suburban lifestyle.   Of course this may just be the spoiled American talking. I’m not saying I wish to be poor, only that I wish to be more knowledgable of the people out there, to feel the things that they feel, to understand, in any small way I can, the lives they live, and to see the beautiful power of people who see what is important in life.  It’s just a guess, but I would say that these important things–they extend far beyond money. 

Pictures Credits: The Slums of Mumbai by SuratL and Slum by the Sea by Jeremy Higgs