Flying Lessons

…some reflections on finding ourselves in impossible situations

Yamaska River by Richard Nevin [pastel on paper] Photo Cliff Scholz

For a long time now I have felt that humanity was navigating into a “checkmate” situation, in which all perceived moves seem to be prohibited or fraught with mortal risk.

That said, a checkmate is only a checkmate if we assume all our available moves are confined to a single plane of action, in this case a chessboard. In a game like chess we abide by these rules and solve problems within the confines of the game. In life, maybe not so much. There are spaces beyond the board, undefined by those 64 squares. There are spaces above and below, similarly undefined. For this reason, in life, no checkmate is final.

When I was about 15 or 16, I went to visit my aunt and cousins in Sutton, Quebec — then a sleepy backwater, now a ski resort and tourism town — on the northern fringe of the Green Mountains near the Vermont border. So it’s hilly country. Being young and foolish, I decided to see how fast I could pedal a 10-speed down a two-track gravel road on a big hill near their home, forested on both sides. I thought it was fun back then to reach a threshold of speed on narrow paths in which my field of vision narrowed to what I thought of as about the size of a coffee can lid. I would then scan and navigate using that small circle. Everything else became a blur. On the narrow wooded footpaths I was accustomed to bicycling in back in Michigan, I could do that. Here, on a wider road made for cars, I had to go faster. Fortunately, I had the worn, rounded nub of an ancient mountain behind me and a favorable gear ratio below. I pedaled as hard as I could.

Then, a rock appeared in the road ahead, coming up fast, shining out with shocking clarity, surrounded by blur. It wasn't a huge rock. It was maybe five or six inches across, partly embedded in the gravel, and roughly triangular in shape. But it was not something you want to hit going fast on a bike. Still, to swerve would have been to wipe out sideways or risk collisions with the trees on either side of the road. In a split second, I decided to hit the rock squarely. I don’t remember braking. Maybe I did, but I don’t think I had much time. I also don’t remember letting go of the handlebars, but I must have, because…

… suddenly, I was airborne. Time slowed down. I watched my eyeglasses tumbling away in space off to my left as though through a thick liquid. I made a mental note of where they were headed so I could find them later. Seemed I had plenty of time. Looking down, I was met with a vivid impression of a blur of gravel passing underneath my body, moving very fast. The sight of it was riveting — I understood the road to be a danger — but everything was still going slow, somehow. Then suddenly something told me to tuck, and I did. Still in flight, I curled up to tumble and then felt the rough impact of my shoulders hitting the gravel road. I somersaulted back onto my feet and suddenly I was running as fast as I could downhill, trying to slow myself down. At the moment my feet hit the ground, I found myself back in consensus time.

Feeling exhilarated but a little shaky, I headed back to find my eyeglasses. My circle of clarity had widened again. My glasses were exactly where I remembered. Next I grabbed the bike. Putting the front wheel between my legs, I straightened the handlebars, got back on and took it slow and easy the rest of the way down the hill, riding the brakes.

When I got to the house a few minutes later, I exclaimed, “Aunt Marilyn, you wouldn’t believe what just happened!

“Yes, I would,” she said. “Look at your back.”

I glanced over my shoulder. It was a mess. Blood was streaming from numerous little cuts and abrasions. Nothing too deep but not exactly comfortable.

Now it probably goes without saying that such an accident could very easily have resulted in serious injury and quite possibly proven fatal. Granted, bicycle helmets were basically unknown at the time, so I can be forgiven for not wearing one. But the whole thing: pedaling to the top of a steep hill and pedaling down as fast as I could just to achieve a strange effect on my vision — let’s just say that by any reasonable standard, that represented not merely one but a series of stupid, stupid moves. I had with uncanny deliberateness put myself in an impossible situation. Checkmate.

But that’s not how it turned out. It wasn’t game over. My whole life as I had known it had not finished. Instead it felt like I had popped into another dimension entirely during those brief but somehow lengthy airborne moments. An enormous number of finely tuned calculations seemed to happen in that spacious interval, the net result being that I avoided all the potentially catastrophic consequences of the event while preserving all things of real value, including my life of course, and my awareness that it really happened.

“You were lucky,” says the adult mind.

And, since I do have an adult mind, I won’t deny that. I wear a bicycle helmet these days. And these days I find the experiences I’m looking for in my vision not by speeding down mountainsides but by sitting down with a set of watercolor paints or just tuning in to what I’m seeing and how I’m seeing it, wherever I am. I learned my lesson, as the saying goes. But it wasn’t a simple piece of learning, by any means. The lessons I learned were as multidimensional as the experience itself.

Truth is, I don’t know how I did what I did that day in Quebec, tumbling through the air into a full-out run down the road.

Then again, in the time it takes me to write these words and for you to read or to hear them, our hearts will have gone through multiple lub-dub cycles together. Personally, just like I’m not sure how I walked away from that bicycle accident, I don’t know how my heart keeps on beating, either, but apparently something inside me knows how, because it keeps happening. Further, I rather suspect that given the astronomical number of calculations needed to keep our hearts beating so reliably, time must work differently on the levels of the cellular, molecular and electrical activity in what we think of as our physical bodies. How else could there be enough time to make all those decisions with so many moving parts and so many things happening at once? I can only conclude that there’s plenty of time.

And on this 
roiling ferment 
of unfathomable 
complexity, 

we breathe 
together, 
you and me. 

Moving fast 
down the 
ancient mountain,
we share 
our circles 
of clarity 
amidst the incredible
onrush, 
the astonishing blur. 

Suddenly we are flying,
so fast, so slow.
Isn’t it amazing? 

But really, 
we always were. 

So, in a way, what might at first seem like an exceptional experience on a Canadian mountain reveals something universal. That’s really the only reason it’s worth sharing about.

We’re always flying. We’re always tumbling. Time is always spongy and stretchy. We’re always going down an ancient mountain in our pursuit of instructive experiences. We’re also navigating by means of small circles of clarity. We’re always doing feats we can barely comprehend, and negotiating transitions that seem impossible until they happen. That’s normal. That’s baseline.

And that, my friends, is also why there are ultimately no checkmates on this game board we’re living on. If our every heartbeat is a transcendent, multidimensional event that spans different kinds of space and time, accomplished by means that are as strange and alien as anything we see in science fiction, it seems likely that pretty much everything in life matches that description if we’re willing to see it that way. Even starting to think more in terms of coloration, shades and hues instead of insisting that everything is black and white squares can help.

I don’t want to say that the squares we think of ourselves as living on or the edges of the chessboard “aren’t real,” or “aren’t there,” and I don’t want to be glib about any of this, especially the feelings of shock that sometimes come up when we are separated from our customary patterns. But I will say that the spaces around us — above, below, and all around — hold a lot of possibilities that we don’t normally see.