bike love.

In April of this year, I started riding my bike to work every day. I had bought a used bike months earlier and it sat, patiently chained to our front steps, waiting for me to work up the nerve to ride it in the city (see #21). I can’t remember what exactly gave me the push, but J did a practice ride with me one weekend, and the following Monday, I did it.

Like most things we’re afraid of (at least for me) the anticipation is far worse than actually living out the thing you feared. For the first few weeks, I had to swallow down the lumps of anxiety before heading out the door. I caught myself lying in bed at night, obsessing over how I would change lanes in that one tricky spot around the park or what would happen if I hit a pothole in the dark and wiped out. But in the moment, riding my bike every day, passing car after car stuck in traffic, is the most liberating and exciting part of my day.

This sums it all up.

In other notes, if you were ever a fan of the Dear Sugar columns, back before we even knew who was writing them, then GET THIS NOW NOW NOW. Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond (the original Sugar!) are hosting a Dear Sugar Radio Hour. I listened to the first episode after work on Friday and it was the perfect start to the weekend.

But the weekend is over, and its Tuesday morning now, and the week marches on.

another day.

I have another post for today, one that I started on Friday and started on Saturday and started on Sunday. It felt so urgent all week and I just couldn’t get it done. Yesterday was wide open. My plans were to do some Christmas baking, pack up our Christmas gifts, and listen to lots of Christmas music (Alternating between this and this because I have no shame.)

I bought some soy coffee creamer over the weekend. Cream in the coffee feels like vacation to me, because I usually drink it black. All weekend I was pouring cream into my coffee and feeling special.

J and I biked down to Jimmy T’s for breakfast yesterday and managed to roll up just as a table by the window opened. We had huevos rancheros and an egg sandwich and mediocre coffee and super sweet grapefruit juice. We talked about the what next in work and life which is…….well, it’s unknown. It’s good. It’s scary. It’s wild. We tried to make quick business of running some errands after breakfast, which wound up meaning that we biked down to the organic grocery for the bulk nuts, then to CVS for the Drano and a gold Sharpie (an obvious need at this time of year), and then to the regular grocery store for lasagna noodles.

We finally got home and settled into work, J on some writing that needed to be finished, and me on baking all the things that I wanted to pack into boxes and mail away for Christmas. A few hours of lighthearted baking suddenly stretched into the night, and when I briefly thought that I had put too much coconut oil in the melted chocolate and it wasn’t going to harden, I nearly lost it. J needed quiet, so I was listening to my Christmas tunes in headphones. The Drano down the bathroom sink made the whole apartment smell like chemicals instead of sugary Christmas goodness. This isn’t the sort of day you find in the so-lovely internet world, where everything is polished and perfect.

here and there.

I’m starting in from the void (it feels). What did I see today? What did I hear? What did I think? It was all soft-focus and quiet, which I don’t mind at all….but then what do I write about?

I thought a lot today about what it means to surround yourself with things and people and experiences that support you, and what it means to build your life around joy.

I am planning a little writing challenge/retreat-for-one next year. I may or may not incorporate it into this space, I’m not sure yet, but I’m excited to start.

I have a project idea that is just brewing and brewing in my head. It would take a little money and a little time and I’m starting to ask myself, seriously, how I can make it happen.

I feel full, to the tip-top, but not with words. So a few here and there can be enough.

something different tonight.

I want to write about anything but writing. But really, I just want to write. Per usual, my thoughts feel scattered and elastic and just-out-of-reach and I keep finding a little thing here and a little thing there to do. Fold the laundry, make an omelet, hang a picture. I’m always so productive at the moment I tell myself to write.

What if I wrote about something different tonight? What if I wrote about how I used to believe in God and now I don’t? Even writing that sentence puts my stomach into knots. It is the biggest and most oppressive on my own list of things that are difficult to talk about. I don’t know who clicks their way through here these days and I don’t know who is reading. On this topic, there is bound to be some disagreement. I know very well, and deeply, that I've hurt some in the past. So I live in fear of hurting or offending anyone anywhere ever. I’d rather be the opposite, but fear can be a tricky thing to release.

I’m listening to the first Fleet Foxes album tonight, because it is certainly the time for it, and also I may have mildly overdone the Christmas tunes over the weekend. White Winter Hymnal always takes me back to the winter in my tiny bedroom in Wellfleet. It was adjacent to the dining room and must have been a pantry at some point because it barely fit a twin bed and a dresser and it had no heat. There was always sand on the floor, scattered over the blue green industrial carpet, because it was Cape Cod and the vacuum cleaners rarely were working in that house. There was always sand in the sheets as well, and each night I’d pull back the blanket and brush the sand out. In the winter, when it was very cold, I’d pile on my layers and crawl underneath a thick comforter and bury my head into the pillows. White Winter Hymnal takes me back there.

thinking on.

Well, November has come and gone.

I just looked back at my calendar to remind myself. What happened? How did all of those days fly by? How did I forget to come back here?

It happens, forever and ever, the waves crash and melt away, they rise with intensity, they fall back with peace.

Things I have been thinking about lately:
-money (savings, paying debts, making plans)
-possessions
-simplicity
-family
-the road
-the unknown
-the future

I always get the urge to write something when I see something that I wish I had written. Or I hear of someone making something that I wish I had made. Today it was this, one of my very favorite blogs, and her amazing announcement that she is writing a book on simplicity. I thought: How wonderful! And then: I wish I was writing that book.

I started reading this little book over Thanksgiving, which I happen to love, mostly because it speaks directly to me and my organizer brain. I’m not sure it would be the best read if you’re not already prone to or longing for tidiness. But it does have me fairly jazzed up about the idea of filling my life only with objects and possessions that bring joy. J and I are already minimal people, partly because we live in a small space, but I think we could do more to hold on to things that bring joy and let go of those that don’t.