Time and Space

I mentioned in my last post that I learned some things about time and space on my trip. I wasn't referring to physics there, exactly, I was referring to the space that exists outside my front door (as noted in the title of my blog) and the time it could take one to see or traverse that space. I really got to thinking about it the day that Cleveland fireman told us that he and his wife had driven nearly 300 miles north to Frankenmuth Michigan (inexplicably, to visit a Christmas decoration store and a family style roast chicken restaurant, but that's beside the point) in about five hours. As I was digesting this piece of information it occurred to me that it was going to take Marc and I five days to travel that distance. And neither of us had even a remote interest in Christmas decorations or that particular roast chicken restaurant, although at the time we could have eaten a pile of roast chicken, no doubt. Time and Space. I thought about it again the first time I rode in an automobile after the trip. I was in the passenger seat of my Dad's car, headed to a grocery store, and the whole time I was thinking, "dear God, why are we going so fast? We'll surely be killed!" Of course, we weren't really going that fast, just a lot faster than the 18 miles per hour, or so, top speed that Marc and I had been traveling for the previous two weeks. Marc relayed a similar story, saying that the first time he had driven a car after the trip he had been surprised at how quickly a following car had come up behind him and annoyed that the car was impatiently tailgating him, until he realized that he was driving 25 miles per hour. And he didn't want to go any faster. All of this made me think about how unnatural it is to always be traveling at 60 or 70 miles per hour; inhuman almost. Even the bike is unnatural, considering that without some kind of machine beneath us we humans can't really hope to go much faster than 15 miles per hour and then only for a short distance. Maybe we should slow down a little. I gave the issue even further contemplation on the car ride home to Vermont. Granted, the drive was along a much more direct route, but the fact remains that we traversed the same space, from Freeland Michigan to Rutland Vermont. In the car it took just about exactly 12 hours. On a bike it took 14 days and caused a lot of people to ask, with varying degrees of seriousness, "are you crazy?" Well, not really, when you consider that for most of human history, traveling 1000 miles in fourteen days would be considered awfully fast. Maybe even dangerously fast. If you ask me, covering 700 miles in 12 hours is a lot crazier. Think about it from an animal perspective (we are animals, after all, despite our affinity for fancy flatware and high thread count sheets.) What would your dog or cat be more comfortable with; being sealed in a steel capsule rocketing through the air for 12 hours, or loping along on the ground, nosing out new curiosities and sleeping under the stars? Actually, domesticated animals might not be the best examples, some of them are almost as used to being in motor vehicles as we are. But you get the point. Traveling at human speed is less crazy than internal combustion. Time and Space. You know what else is different about traveling by bicycle? It's a lot harder to do more than one thing at a time. Which is a positive thing. I think we all need to re-learn how to nothing. When was the last time you sat still and did nothing (other than the last ten minutes of a yoga class, although that's a good start.) It's quite a stretch to think about doing nothing if you're always doing at least two things at a time. Think about it, you're driving and talking on the phone; you're eating breakfast and reading the paper and listening to the Weather Channel; you're checking your voice mail and email simultaneously. Wouldn't it be nice to find the time (and space) to do nothing?