Bird Mail: Season 02, Issue 03
Hi friend,
It’s been a while again.
This is Bird Mail, which, if you’ve forgotten (totally reasonable) is an only-on-Tuesdays newsletter of photo essays and internet ephemera, written by me, Bruce Layman, for you.
As always, if you can’t handle getting Bird Mail in your inbox any longer, it’s cool, the Club will miss you, but you can unsubscribe.
I am glad you are still here.
Onward.
I know, it doesn’t look like much. It doesn’t even really make any sense.
That line cuts through yards and houses and…that big ditch?
But, if you were to look for me after school or swim practice in the early 2000s you’d probably find me riding my green Schwinn Frontier somewhere along that line.
The route didn’t change much: out the garage, into the drainage ditch, dropping in down one of the ruts from the last rain—it’d probably been months—back up the other side, up and down up and down, up to the “dirt jumps”—on the map where the line cuts through the houses there used to be only mesquite scrub with some ATV double track with bumps that you could catch air off of—back down the alley to “A” Street for as many laps as I could do, then a stop at the—now gone, it’s something called an Alon(?)—7-11 on the corner to spend a-buck-and-a-quarter on a Slurpee to cool off before going home.
I can’t tell you how many times I rode that path, if I got faster, or how many miles I covered.
This was long before I knew what a bike computer was, before we all quantified our every action in the pursuit of a better self or more productivity.
I used that time on the bike to think, decompress, enjoy the movement of my—often awkward feeling—body, and to quiet my neurotic mind.
Now I have a label for this kind of madness behavior: Repeats.
I’ve heard that as adults, we often return to the childhood hobbies we enjoyed, finding some of the same benefits in them now that we did then. I find myself turning to hills when I need to build some fitness, but also quiet my mind. Coming back to the same stretch of road over and over again affords you the opportunity to really learn it. After three or four laps you know it.
Avoid that crack on the left.
The dip in the road is right here.
You should be pushing seventeen miles per hour here if you’re feeling good, fourteen if you’re not.
The riding and the effort is now automatic, now your mind can wander.
I have used repeats as a way to muddle through a problem for work, remember something I thought I’d long forgotten, or yes, draft a Bird Mail for you.
In the moments when there is less for my brain to noodle on, there is joy to be had in focusing on the weather, the pedal stroke, the breath.
You do not need a bike to harness the power of Repeats—though it is definitely one of the best ways to enjoy them.
A familiar walking path.
The dishes.
Any repetitive action that you can sink into, allow to become automatic, and let your mind wander is fair game for Repeats.
Use them to your advantage.
Gathered Links
Thank you for reading this long overdue issue of Bird Mail. I have another couple photo essays that I have been slowly working–read procrastinating–on that, with any luck will follow this one soon.
Goodbye for now, Bruce
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