Between Christmas and New Year I came off my bike, a mountain bike. I was riding around a corner—quite open, loose track and no camber to speak of—when the bike slipped in the gravel and brought me to a hard landing on my left knee.
One of the features of riding a mountain bike—and probably any bike for that matter—is that because you have successfully negotiated a track innumerable times does not mean that you are immune from succumbing to its vagaries at some time in the future. It’s not about luck or skill or concentration, though all are important when riding, as they are in life. It’s just that shit happens without consultation or consideration of the consequences. And we are left to deal with those consequences. Which is why I am now laying in a hospital bed awaiting the next bout of surgery on my injured knee.
Those vagaries that apply to mountain biking have their analogues in all aspects of life. While we might like life to be like riding an escalator—constant, predicable, known up or down, easy to access and exit, smooth going—it isn’t. It’s quite the opposite.
I rode the escalator of life—and mountain biking—to my satisfaction. Well, to as much satisfaction as could reasonably be expected from life anyway. Of course there were times when I, like everyone else, stood at the bottom of a set of escalators wondering which I should take. Up or down? What opportunities awaited me at the end of each ride? Possibly more importantly, what opportunities would I miss by taking one escalator and foregoing the other?
Yes, I could ride both, but opportunity has this tendency to be fleeting. While I am half way up the up side, it is disappearing into the depths of the down side, for instance.
But if I have set out with a specific objective in mind, if I know it’s at the end of one specific escalator, surely that’s a different matter? Maybe. With all the ‘opportunities’ surrounding escalators—the shops, people, alley ways, dark corners—it is all too easy to loose sight of our objective(s). Maintaining a single-mindedness in the world of attractive and desirable opportunities is difficult. In many ways it’s about knowing the landscape of escalators, keeping our objectives in the forefront of our minds and then seeking only those opportunities that contribute to our objectives.
In this way an escalator is neither up nor down. It simply is a way of following opportunities. As such all escalators are up taking us towards where we want to be.
Words and images 