I have the sense that bicycle metaphors may hold preeminence for a bit. Sleek and streamlined, narrow-tired, aero-rimmed, the touring bike with which I was about to spend more of my time than with any human being for the next two weeks leaned casually against a corridor wall in Manchester Airport \u2013 ready for action. Unencumbered, it was a thing of beauty. Then the \u2018encumbering\u2019 began. First the rack that would hold panniers away from the spokes of the rear wheel \u2013 and hopefully contain all the \u2018stuff\u2019 I would require for this fortnight. Then the brackets for the \u2018hungry-man\u2019 sized handlebar bag. Followed by the mount for what some, less well-prepared acquaintances have dismissed as David\u2019s wide screen TV; aka, my GPS that would guide me to those remote B & B\u2019s in the Yorkshire Dales (missing a turn in a car is one thing; 10 kilometers out of one\u2019s way on a bicycle can be, shall we say, a little more frustrating). Frame pump, under-saddle tool bag, water bottle, waterproof pannier covers, front and rear lights \u2013 and the kitting out was complete. I gingerly mounted, deluding myself that I could cycle my way out of the bowels of the airport, only to find that my responsive, light-weight, and \u2018balanced\u2019 bike had metamorphosed into an awkward, unpredictable, finicky, and decidedly burdened semblance of its former self; mirroring even the most insignificant departures from a perfect perpendicular with the front wheel twisting sideways on itself and the whole unit ready to collapse in a heap with any lapse in the rider\u2019s attention. I was immediately reminded of accounts of Arthurian knights\u2019 steeds caving under the weight of their own \u2018protective\u2019 armour.<\/p>\n
A second image, also cycle-based but from a much earlier stage, is that of my first two-wheeler presented me by parents as a birthday gift on one of those rare early November days when southern Ontario was blessed with a significant snow fall. Unable to engage the usual father-son ritual of having the former run along clutching the underside of saddle to support and maintain the upright latter unit of son on wobbly bike, I had to content myself using the fridge as father-surrogate as I rocked to and fro in our kitchen, making first attempts at balancing this creature that seemed (not unlike the loaded unit in the airport) more intent on falling over than on remaining vertical. (I really do need to stop biking indoors!)<\/p>\n
Either way, balance is a tricky, elusive thing. For the perhaps six-year old David, there was not yet the intuitive \u2018once you learn it, you never forget it\u2019 skill that allows dad to let go the seat, the training wheels to come off \u2013 or, in this auspicious beginning, the fridge to be abandoned for more free-wheeling days. Six decades later, the intuition might well be in place, but the compulsion to sabotage it with \u2018stuff\u2019 \u2013 all very essential, but clutter nonetheless \u2013 had crept in to undermine. Trust (that inner instinct that is just there<\/em> \u2013 very hard to \u2018tell\u2019 someone how to ride a bike) and simplicity: the casualties that are often reflected in an \u2018unbalanced\u2019 life. In the case of the former, the more we attend to our \u2018riding\u2019 (\u201chow am I doing, Dad?\u201d), the more wobbly we become; in the latter, the more we surround ourselves with the \u2018reassuring encumbrances\u2019, the less we are free to attend to the ease and effortlessness of moving through our space.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>A few thoughts on what we might do to restore balance. If we consider our subtle \u2018vertical\u2019 as some hypothetical mid-point between attachment<\/em> (those aspects of our life without which we would surely perish) and avoidance<\/em> (the other end of this continuum wherein reside all those things that, to which were we to be exposed, we would surely perish), then we might be getting a little closer to riding that unencumbered beauty, uphill and down with equal joy. This allows us to position ourselves along the horizontal dimension somewhere between our two \u2018extremes\u2019. I had read an instructive midrash (a Hebrew \u2018teaching story\u2019) that characterizes these end-points as two cliffs between which one is sailing; perched atop one cliff is one of a pair of characteristics and atop the other, its opposite. Examples might be generosity and stinginess, patience and impatience, impulsivity and procrastination. The task, in retaining \/ regaining our balance is to first<\/em> be mindful of what sits on our \u2018right\u2019 and \u2018left\u2019; secondly<\/em>, to steer a course between \u2013 taking care not to pass too closely to one rocky wall or the other; and thirdly<\/em>, to resist judging either as inherently good (becoming too attached to it) or bad (avoiding it). A fourth<\/em> aspect is that of \u2018subtlety\u2019 \u2013 taking care that our \u2018course corrections\u2019 do not represent overly aggressive, \u2018over-compensations\u2019 (recall what happens when riding that \u2018balanced bike\u2019 when one jerks the handlebars too radically; better to subtly lean in one direction or another \u2013 if one is to stay uprigtht!)<\/p>\n