I have a better understanding now of what Robert M Pirsig was talking about in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when he wrote:

“In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through the car window everything you see is just more TV.  You’re just a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

On a cycle the frame is gone.  You’re completely in contact with it all.  You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”

I agree, I also know that I am also more present in the moment when I’m on the bike, there are fewer distractions.  Now leaving aside the practise of cyclists who wear mp3 players, which to my mind is just plain dangerous, there are just fewer things to distract you on a bike as opposed to driving a car.  I speak as a driver with more than 15 years experience, no stereo, no conversations or arguments, no mobile phone while driving.  Know what?  It’s great….

The sheer extra sense of presence is well worth it, and I’m rediscovering a whole side to my home town I’d forgotten about and areas that I’d never seen but can now explore more easily.  It occurs to me that you really do miss an awful lot in a car.

We use a huge amount of our energy in transport, I’m finding the march to electric cars and other ‘alternatives’ interesting to watch.  We already have the problem that without cheap, plentiful and energy dense fuel, we can no longer use the methods of air travel that we do, how much more true is this for cars?  The fuels we use in cars and planes provide us with a lot of energy in a small space, more than you might think, in fact they are far superior to any solid fuel, to quote a site that covers alternate energy sources:

“to replace your petrol tank with plant biomass, for instance, it would require two and a half times the mass (rather simplified, of course).” -  The Wolf at the Door. (the graph in figure E2 is illuminating)

The problem we have is getting that much energy around the place, and generating it in the first place.  We can keep pace with our current energy demands, but what happens when everybody starts plugging their electric cars into the electricity grid and demanding that sort of energy from it several times a week?  Remember, we don’t have to generate all that energy in oil, it’s conveniently there already.

The alternative fuels revolution is looking, at least to me, like us sticking our head in the sand and pretending we can keep doing “Business As Usual”.  I don’t agree with this, we can’t keep on this way, I’m increasingly of the opinion that “BAU” is not a viable option.

So, where do I see our options?  Greater use of Public transport is a good place to start, allowing us to quickly increase the efficiency of our travel with services that are already in place and working.  Of course, public transport networks do need improvement in many areas, and in others are, for the moment, almost unavailable.  For freight, rail travel is much more efficent than road, with the advantage of removing the huge HGVs from most of our roads.  I think that a network of mostly light rail and walkable / rideable cities, with the option of electric vehicles for commercial use will go a long way towards making a much more pleasant environment for us and our children and keep the wheels turning in a more sustainable way.

There is another option, one that’s good for our waistlines as well as our bank balances. Many of us can act quickly to improve our health, cut our emissions and our fuel bills by cycling around the place.  Even if it’s just one day a week to work, or to the shops and back, we should try to replace car trips with bike trips.  A bike uses, far fewer resources to make, maintain and run than many other modes of transport.  A good cycling advocacy website is Why Cycle?.

So, am I preaching from my armchair here?  No, I bought a mountain bike and some accessories on the weekend of the 4th April and started practising with it, and I’m having a really enjoyable time.  I have a greater degree of choice on my routes than I do with a car and also few of the associated costs, unlike a car, I can expect the bike to pay for itself with fuel savings.  Maintenance is something that needs doing, but is enormously cheap compared to a car.

I’m also discovering that if you’re a little outgoing with it, you speak to people more and it makes things much more rewarding.  I’m finding something Robert M Pirsig said to be very true, in Zen and The Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, he says that on a motorbike you’re part of the scene, not seperated from it by a car.  As I’m travelling more slowly and quietly, I’m finding that very true, even more true for a bicycle than a motorbike.  This changes the whole nature of travelling.

I’m also getting into situations that are completely new to me, let me give a very cool example from the morning of Sunday 12th.

I’d gone out for a ride along the local canals and got to a local nature reserve, I decided to try my lights and went through the Netherton Tunnel, nearly 2.8 km (1.7 miles) of darkness with light and air shafts in the ceiling.  I got through there fine and had a ride round the canals at the other end then turned and came back.  As I got to the tunnel a narrowboat was going in and the driver and his wife joked about me riding a bike through the tunnel.  So I slowed down and kept pace with the boat through the tunnel, using their boat headlights to provide much better light than my smaller lights.  We wound up having a good conversation while travelling for nearly an hour way underground and bumped into some other cyclists on the way.

I’ll no doubt return to my bike in future posts.

I’m thinking about blind acceptance of “common wisdom”, even when a little reflection will show it for the sham that it is. Surely, being in “your prime” is entirely attitude, there’s so much more to it than simple physical condition or age. In any event, our technology and extending lifespans are rewriting the rules as we go.

But even purely in physical condition terms, I’ve seen people at least 10 years older than me walk into the gym and match the younger gym rats in terms of performance.

Perhaps the notion of “prime of life” is inaccurate? I think it’s not the possession of a physical or mental condition, but its expression. It’s not what you’ve got but how you use it?

I’ve been looking after a friends house this weekend, also with the house come one or two animals.  Her dog, Lady, needs plenty of exercise and I stepped up to the challenge.

I though I was fit, but I’ve had it proved to me again, that all that time in the gym does not mean you’re real world fit.  Thanks Lady.

What’s been of equal interest is to observe Lady as we’ve been walking.  She often stops to sniff, clearly privy to a world that I would have walked straight past.  It brought it home to me how much of our daily world we take for granted.  We walk round with our heads in the clouds without realising that there could easily be a whole layer of the world there that we are blind to.

Walking the dog as spirituality, I never would have thought of it!

Those views were helped along by a few things, I’d been encouraged to push harder in the gym only to be met with pain and injury. I’d witnessed workplace politics handled in a way I completely disagreed with, this has happened more than once across a number of companies. I also found myself questioning with our national work ethic, is this the right way?

I asked myself a question, “Am I mad, or is there a better way?” In the gym I reminded myself of the 70% rule of moderation. It’s a great little rule I learned from Tai Chi, you only work at 70% of your max; energy and attention are kept back for working on a gradual improvement in your performance, also to make sure you don’t burn out on the way, it’s a long term game plan, but it offers greater potential than flogging yourself to death. I’m working at less than my max now, focusing on technique, I don’t doubt I’ll get back to the weights and performance I had, but when I do it’ll be with much better technique, I’ll be able to handle it much better than I did.

As far as the whole work thing goes, I find myself with less invested in the long hours culture we have here in the UK, as a result I don’t do overtime anymore unless it’s an emergency. Again, this comes back to moderation; whatever some might like to think, we don’t live to work.

I’ve seen the results of office politics and crackdowns on more than once occasion and in more than one company, striving for more results, more controls, a greater bottom line. I’ve seen it reach a point that employee goodwill was lost, people refused to work overtime, wouldn’t go out of their way for their employer; the workplace spirit was lost.

This is a way echoes comments in my previous post, crackdowns and tightening up have their place, but if you take it too far it hurts far more than it helps, you can wind up flogging the horse to death if you’re not careful.

This comes back to moderation, the middle way. Yes, you can keep driving people harder towards business goals, “Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes”, but in the end the human cost will be huge.  We already see this, lots of stress and work-life imbalances and not just in the UK, sooner or later we must settle into a steady state, not the greed driven relentless drive for better growth; for the sake of our own collective health and sanity.

I think that this excerpt from chapter 23 of the Tao Te Ching sums up my thoughts on this:

Sparse speech is natural
Thus strong wind does not last all morning
Sudden rain does not last all day
What makes this so? Heaven and Earth
Even Heaven and Earth cannot make it last
How can humans?

I asked myself; Why?  You can engage in all the politics you want in the office to “get ahead”, eventually you have to retire you have to hand you position to someone else.  Same with the gym, there is a limit to what you can lift, how fast you can run, etc.  This limit can only diminish with age, eventually you’ll have to back off.

Eventually we all die, we enter the world with nothing and guess what we take with us, so why on earth bother?  The more I look at it, the more I see the futility of all the striving for these goals that are as real as a puff of smoke.

We strive for things to try and make us happy, even Buddhist can strive for enlightenment, but that just makes it one more chain.  I wonder what would happen to society if everyone realised the futility of this?

An interesting thought exercise, yes?

When I started back in Bodypump, I reduced the weight and found that it was in fact more effective than before.  This sounds odd, until you remember the 70% rule from Tai Chi.  Put simply, you never try to push too hard, you don’t strain yourself and you’ll still find your performance will improve.  Because not all of your energy is spent on strain and pain, you can use it for improvement.  When you’re not straining, you can pay more attention to your technique, soon your 70% is equal to everyone else’s 101% and you’re still not straining.

I’ve always said, you learn more from getting it wrong.

It’s interesting to contrast Taijiquan and my usual Bodypump classes, as I do view them as different sides of the Taji symbol. I used to consider the internal exercise superior, an attitude that I picked up from an ex-colleague, I’ve reconsidered my approach these days.

While I appreciate the external exercise I get in the Gym, I found Tajiquan provides a missing part of the exercise picture, I appreciate that more now that I’m doing both than I did when I was just doing Tai Chi or Gym classes by themselves.

I have a feeling that the two are going to compliment each other quite nicely, does anyone else have any experience with this?

We already have everything we need for fitness, we’re fully equipped. You have a body capable of exercising and, most importantly the willingness to do it. The fancy gyms are not really needed, they’re very nice to have, but not vital.

But going beyond that, I keep seeing new equipment, new supplements and nutrition bars, shakes and powders. It’s as if fitness has been turned from something to be enjoyed, into something chained down with a kind of performance anxiety, with the inference that you’re not doing it right unless you’re using this or that gadget or supplement. Part of my attitude stems from my old backstreet gym days, when it was just you and weight. But also from my time at Tai Chi, there can be no gimmickry there, it’s just you and the form.

Indulge me, try the following exercise with me. Close your eyes, allow yourself to breathe normally, be still for a few seconds and relax. Imagine your time in the gym, think of the machines, the supplement bars and drinks, the merchandising, all of it. Give yourself permission to let it go, one thing at a time, empty the gym in your mind.

Look at what’s left. Your motivation, the fact you enjoy it, your desire to improve yourself. Without these things, the rest of it is a lie.

I would fail on certain reps, and thinking about it later, I was reminded of something in Lawrence Leamers’ bio of Schwarzenegger. The notion is that a body like Arnies’ is built one rep at a time. Fair play, but I think to bring a little Buddhism in here, it’s also built by being in the moment.

You have to be present during each rep, not just doing them mechanically, but almost like a form of meditation. The middle path is the best way to take, not total balls to the wall but a more moderated approach, don’t rush. When I felt a tendon in one of my forearms complain during an exercise, I backed off on the weight. Buddhism teaches us to try to take a wider view, thinking about it fitness is also built outside the gym, diet and rest are critical factors and we forget them to our ruin.

The observation that both exercise and Buddhism happen in the moment is an interesting thought, I look forward to seeing where this leads!