Every once in a while, I meet somebody that quiets the mind and has me paying closer attention simultaneously. Last spring, I was invited on a gravel ride and carpooled an hour and a half away with somebody that had that effect.
On the way there, I remember listening for how well this person seemed to stay with my dry humor and observational commentary, even as I was muted with it.
We got to the start of the ride and I noticed that neither of us took much conversational lead, which was further relieving. 90 minutes of proximity was enough to solidify my decision to take on a big route with someone I barely knew.
A quarter mile of highway took us from a park parking lot to crisp, fine gravel roads with a climbing profile that was almost immediately visible. And as it goes, the tone of the first 30 minutes of a ride are reliable in predicting my mindset all the way up until the final 30. It took hardly that long for me to make some sort of lively comment about how at home I felt amongst a landscape where the residents seemed less likely to have any teeth.
I was entirely unbothered by the navigational error that led us up a large and unnecessary climb, and my friend missing the turn for a second time when we went back down. I stopped next to the turn and waited for them, and said,
“Eh, they’ll come back.”
Through the light-heartedness, every once in a while, I got the disclosures of past hard life experiences and fond anecdotes of people I would never meet. I told them how I wondered if I evaded substance abuse simply because I sometimes experience an endogenous high on cognition alone.
At the last supply stop they propped their feet up on the table and I wondered,
How are you that chill?
I got a huge laugh out of them later when I said “conservatives have little self-awareness and liberals have little self-control,”
and another one when I said that if they had not stopped ahead of me I would have rolled right off the washed out bridge at dusk.
“I told him no!” I shouted after a dog began to chase me down the road, then thought again.
“And he listened!” My friend volleyed back.
The route was one I’d love to visit again, but I may not because I don’t know how much of that experience was adorned simply by how calm I felt internally the entire time.
After loading the car back up at the end, we drove back into town and decided on takeout for dinner. We walked into the lobby of a restaurant and ordered separately. I took a seat on the bench to wait and they hit the restroom.
When they came back, they sat down on the other end of the bench, with about five feet between us.
Now, why did you think that?
The story is not the point.
I will the machine. 