At the end of every almost every business trip I take (mostly to the east coast), I have this weird existential thought about the fact that, just a half a day prior, I was 2,000+ miles away from my front door. Yet, all the miles in between where I was earlier that day and the where I am while having the thought are completely foreign and unknown to me. I get in a car that takes me to an airport, I get in a metal tube (the airplane) and then I pop out the other side in a completely different location. Rinse and repeat.
Day after day, meeting after meeting, location after location. I go through life hopping from one important event to the next. Traveling all the time and always busy. I have more things to do in the day than I have hours. The wheel of time keeps spinning and I often only stop to think about what I’m doing when I’ve put that thing in the calendar. Meanwhile, the time and the journey in between is completely lost to me.
Life becomes like a Tarantino movie with prolonged scenes of intense dialogue and important information packed into an unchanging backdrop, only to cut to another completely different scene with the details in between being fuzzy and only partially related to the previous scenes. It’s almost like an old, low resolution and pixelated computer screen. There are big and important pixels all over, but the resolution isn’t fine enough to see the details. Despite juggling a lot of responsibilities, life can seem low res.
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Contrast this to my son who just learned to ride his bike without training wheels. He’ll spend hours riding his bike in circles around our block. There is no end goal to his travel. The act of biking itself is the means and the ends all wrapped in one. Every inch of the sidewalk becomes part of the experience. When riding his bike, he can choose to take a detour through the grass or jump it off a small curb. Not because it’s efficient to do so, but because he can. Because he can he does. There is no need for greater reasoning. To have a bike is to have unchained curiosity and freedom.
Anyone who has ever learned to ride a bike knows that the bike eventually evolves into something that is no longer an inanimate object. Rather, it becomes an appendage to oneself like an arm or a leg. Pedaling becomes a function of your biology. Skipping the gears that don’t work anymore is as natural as nursing a nagging injury. To have a bike is to have an extension of the self.
I put many meaningless miles on my mountain bike. When all the neighborhood friends grabbed our bikes, it usually wasn’t with getting to a specific location in mind. Biking was the thing we were doing. By happenstance sometimes we ended up at Smith’s to buy a soda. Other times we found ourselves building and going off as big of dirt jumps as we could stomach. Other times, we just found ourselves meandering the streets and trails around our houses and talking about whatever things were on our pre-teen minds. To have a bike is to have adventure and possibility at your fingertips without the need for a plan.
This sense of unfettered freedom and adventure continued when I got my first car. Weeks after getting my license I drove to Evanston, WY to buy fireworks just because I could and I (mostly) knew the way. Every mile of that journey feels seared into my memory. The thrill of doing something without permission was intoxicating. To own a car is to own your destiny.
I still remember every word of every song to the Drake album (Take Care) to put in that first car. It’s been nearly a decade and a half after Mckay and I split the cost of buying it. You don’t skip songs when you own a CD. You listen to every song on the album and enjoy the experience of the curation of the music as a whole, not just the individual songs. To own a car is to own your experiences.
Somewhere along the line, however, we stop taking in the details. Biking becomes something we do for exercise only. Driving cars becomes something we do when we have to get to the thing that we have planned. We only listen to the songs we like and the other songs on the album are unknown to us. Albums have become meaningless. The high resolution pixels start fading into the background and only the important blocky chunks of life get our attention. When does that shift happen? Is it when we have to start paying for the flat tires and the oil changes out of our own pockets? Or is it simply a natural process of growing up and preparing to buy a bike and a car for one of your own kids someday?
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Being able to observe my kids explore and experience life in the high-res way that kids do has been extremely rewarding in its own right. It feels good to provide the same safe place to explore that my parents provided to me. A healthy dose of responsibility and hard work have made that possible.
If I’m not careful, however, I can only focus on “winning” the made up (and completely unending) human game of capitalism and reduce my life to series of low res images that I deem as important. So much so that I forget to get on their level again. Not just for their sakes, but also for mine.
There are trails to be explored. There are bugs at which to bend down and observe with wonder. There rocks to be thrown in lakes and rivers. There are bikes to be ridden. There are amazing humans all around me to be appreciated and loved. There are miles to be driven just for the sake of driving while listening to good music. There is joy in the little details of life that don’t need to be any more meaningful than the value they have in the exact moment in which we observe them. To live in the details is to be a kid again. To be a kid is to live life — regardless of age.