Cycling and being a cog
I was cycling to work last Tuesday morning, it was raining heavily. Everything was pretty quiet and I thought a little bit about how it felt like some kind of ritual self-punishment to be resolutely spinning forward, to work, of all places, while getting absolutely sopping wet.
When I got home i went on the turbo-trainer for an hour and a half- it’s kind of like my hamster wheel. On this i continue to pedal and afterwards I get off and I’m reeling from all of the endorphins. I don’t know, I could make some kind of Sisyphean allegory here but I don’t want to be thought of as having notions. I have no such notions about myself. A few weeks ago, i flew too close to the sun (oops, notions) and my wheels fell off- i had been getting so good at doing the thing- getting up, cycling to work, working, cycling home, cycling continuously in one spot for an hour or more, listening to a medieval history podcast, making/eating dinner and then picking from one or more of my interests to cultivate for the rest of the evening. I had a little daily checklist of things I was supposed to do, i read the foreword of Atomic Habits, i found myself on r/productivity and I thought i could feel new synapses forming.
I don’t know what prompted it exactly but i veered off course at some stage and found myself spending my weekends and evenings wandering absently from room to room in the house- I find i spend a lot of time staring out the kitchen window- sometimes i can see a little boy in one of the apartments across the way doing the same thing, I’m pretty sure he’s autistic from the way he rocks back and forth and flaps his fingers. I think I’m probably rocking a bit too, but mostly I’m just trying to take in heat from the radiator, it feels like a bath. I usually have BBC Radio 6 on but then i might switch it to something else. Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of シテイポップ which makes me feel nostalgic for memories I don’t have and a bit deranged. I know its bad when nothing is making the lights in my brain blink on and my media consumption mirrors the way in which my thoughts are occurring, hopping haphazardly from one subject to another- I actually don’t know if one begets the other- in general it is a bit of a chicken and the egg situation and I wonder whether my falling off my routine and hobbies is what leads to my being melancholic or if the lack of motivation and greyness is intrinsic. I know that most likely it is a bit of both and I visualise it as some kind of paradoxical perpetual motion machine which gains momentum from my own inertia.
I don’t need to be more explicit here with the whole cycling and working cog analogy. I suppose that’s why it feels so freeing to me to cycle with no particular direction- I’m still pedalling and sweating but the heat and effort has more of a cathartic effect- while i write this I’m reminded of when i went to Japan last summer after a few of what had been some of the most difficult months in my life. That was really strange- i went from what felt like i was being metaphysically beaten up in a playground week after week to suddenly being completely alone in Tokyo where i wandered aimlessly around the labyrinth in 40+ degrees heat- i was too overstimulated and jet-lagged to eat or sleep, i just sweated continuously and drank litres of ポカリand カルピス. I wondered how much energy it took to keep all of the vending machines powered and how many plastic bottles i had discarded and i also wondered when I’d stopped caring so much about that stuff. At times i felt like a ghost or a floating head on a pilgrimage, undergoing a ritual cleansing, the inverse from the ritual cycle in the rain.
Anyway, maybe I’m just bored and i want to go back to Tokyo.