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Bicycles and Aging

 Kayla tells me that one of the reasons I've been having a fairly difficult time living with myself these days is that I am resisting the fact that I am no longer getting old.  It is not that I've found the fountain of youth, rather it is simply that I AM old.  She can be pretty persuasive, but I also can be pretty resistant.

 Later in the day that she sprang that observation on me I was cleaning out our garage and pulled out the bicycle I had not ridden in the last four years.  Heck I thought, I might as well sell it.  So I posted a listing on a local electronic bulletin board and immediately received some inquires. As I started to answer the first one I looked out the window behind my computer monitor, saw the bike sitting on the front porch and felt it reaching out to me. "Riding me is such fun." 
 I cancelled my listing and looked at the bike. But what I saw was not exactly the funky green bike on my porch.  Somehow it was merged with the red bike I rode with Kayla on Sundays in Golden Gate Park. THAT was the most fun I had in San Francisco.  We lived out by the beach and would ride up to the museums to look at the art, have a Polish sausage by the band stand, and eventually glide back home as the fog rolled in overhead.  Or perhaps I might ride over to the velodrome by myself and do loops with the wonderful smelling ocean winds at my back as I rode in one direction and in my face and hair the other direction.

 All this emerged from the green bike on my porch in high desert Santa Fe as I was taken back to that wonderful time in my life (on the weekends that is). Then I spent the rest of the day and much of the night reflecting on the difference between then and now. Of course my rational Buddhist philosophical mind would remind me that the David of then is not actually the David of now.  My emotional mind would push back. "I prefer the then to the now; the me of then to the me of now; the vigorous middle aged man to the old codger." OK, reality check. These days you are studying a lot about Tsongkhapa's views on dependent origination and emptiness.  Remember?: Everything is devoid of the solid permanence I attribute to it, my body especially.  Why can't I accept that?  Well there they are, staring me in the face: delusion and attachment.  They are almost tangible right now, and worth meditating on. Maybe I should just leave the bike on the porch so I can see it every day and reflect on impermanence?

 Maybe I could just be satisfied with a memory trip back in time to a San Francisco that actually no longer exists and enjoy inhabiting the no-longer-existing self of the past instead of missing it? Maybe as Zachoeje Rinpoche says, I should just enjoy the fact that I am alive and breathing in this moment instead of remembering a past censored of frustrating jobs, buses that missed their runs and a mortgage that pretty much ate my pay check.

 As both Rinpoche and the Dalai Lama have been telling me, my ordinary self does exist, just not in the way I think I exist.  So thank you bicycles for a last gift: what am I? since the one who loves you so deeply apparently is here but not here.

2 comments:

  1. It's interesting when I look back. Much of the time, my memories come to me objectively, like I'm watching a movie. Sometimes 1st person POV, sometimes I see myself in the scene (maybe that's influenced by photographs). Sometimes I try to put myself back there subjectively, and it feels like a different person. Someone whose inner life I have direct access to, but a different someone than the one sitting here reflecting on it. Perhaps, if any memory of different incarnations remains, this is what it feels like. Thanks, David. Still following you. I was a student of yours at JFK. You were a big influence, even though we didn't discuss it at the time.
    Richard Bhakti Klein, Mumbai

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  2. Hello Richard. Blogger does not tell me when someone posts something and I just saw this -- at the end of December!!! --- drop me an email so we can correspond, if you happen to see this reply. david@komito.com

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