BikeWalkBakeBarb

Walking a Path

In the span of three days, in three different books and websites, I read these three quotations.

The path is what happens--
it is not an end in itself.
In order to walk the path,
you have to become the path.

̶ Gary Snyder

When we are fully on one path, we are indirectly preparing another.

̶ Ryúnan Bustamante

No matter what you do, no matter what happens,
it is impossible to leave the path.
Let me say that one more time:
No matter what you do, no matter what happens,
it is impossible to leave the path.

̶ Teddy Macker, excerpt from "A Poem for My Daughter"

I didn't go in search of statements about paths. You might say that without seeking the path, I found the path.

That's what happens, isn't it? You're proceeding along living your life. You turn around and consider what lies behind and there it is: the path you made. Short. Long. Direct. Circuitous. Branching. Rocky. Smooth. Monotonous. Scenic.

Whatever it is, it's yours. Making the path that brought you to this point made you who you are.

I imagine we all have pieces of ourselves we leave behind, and other pieces we wish we could leave behind. When I think about choices I wish I had made differently I have to remind myself that no matter how often I might think about something that happened or something I did, that doesn't change the past. It doesn't change the path I created. It brought me to who and where I am now. I have become the path.

If on the whole I like who I am now I have to recognize that I am this person because of everything on that path. Everything.

If I am kind today it is not only because my mom emphasized kindness. It is also because at times I was unkind and I remember that and am ashamed. I don't spend time beating myself up for those moments. There is no point in being cruel to ourselves; the world does enough of that for us. I simply take the lesson learned: "Be kind. It is who you want to be and how you want to remember yourself when you look back at this moment from farther along your path."

More than one writer has said something along the lines of, "We find what we look for." That is, if I want to review the path behind through a framework in which I consider myself a person who makes mistakes, I'll definitely find mistakes to dwell on. If I want to review it through a framework in which I consider myself a kind person, or a caring person, or a person who likes to try new things, I'll find those moments as well.

What's on the path that I enjoyed and that I want to experience again as I move forward? What are the qualities I have acquired coming to this point in my life that I want to reinforce, and which qualities do I want to consider setting down and leaving behind? What path am I preparing?

Related reading

Kindness Matters

3 Things My Mother Taught Me

A Life Manifesto. Or, as Oprah Would Say, Live Your Best Life

A Little Kindness

How I Came to Be a Bike Advocate

Lost Year. Lost Future?

Nothing anyone writes about 2020 can capture what it really felt like. Human memory doesn't want to hold onto horrors. We want to look away, look forward, move on. If we don't do that we risk sinking into existential dread, drowning in the realities that rise over our heads.

Because it was tragic, at a level we wouldn't believe if someone put it in a movie plot. It is still tragic. Even as I rejoiced in the amazing feeling of having coffee with a friend in a coffee shop--something I took for granted in January 2020, something I treasure as a special moment now--I have to live within these realities.

We still have deep, divisive, damaging racism embedded in everything about the way our world is structured. We've had it for far longer than white people like me recognized, even as we benefited.

We still have the devouring, thoughtless habits of careless consumption that will kill our species. Not the planet--it will survive, in some shape. The Earth doesn't need us to go on. We've lit the planet on fire and we're pouring more gasoline on it every day.

We still have the violent, strange, and polarizing politics that made the simple act of getting a shot--something most of us experienced as a child and yeah, I'm glad I didn't get measles, mumps, whooping cough, or polio, aren't you?--a dividing line.

We still have the yawning chasm between the wealth of a Jeff Bezos--who earns more in one second than some people make in an entire month of hard and thankless work that exposes them to the risk of a potentially deadly disease--and the desperation felt by someone who has to call the back seat of a car their bedroom because that's all they have left.

Historians describe turning points, which are easier to recognize in hindsight than in the moment. I have one particular turning point in mind, though there are many.

I remember my anger when 9/11 happened and I listened to then-President George Bush give us a rousing speech--about why we needed to show that we couldn't be beaten by going shopping.

I'm the daughter of a World War II veteran. I know that when we were asked as a nation to rise to the challenge of the moment by changing our way of life we were able to grow victory gardens, save tin foil, reduce consumption at home so resources could go to our soldiers overseas. 9/11 could have been a turning point to ask that we reduce our dependence on foreign oil so we wouldn't end up making more enemies in the Middle East. We didn't have to put the lives of our own citizens and others into the tanks of our ever-larger vehicles.

We could have committed to a cleaner and greener future. We could have risen to the challenge. We still could.

And if we did that we would also be doing something to confront the terrible legacies of racism. We would be acknowledging and then reducing the greater burdens of pollution and death by traffic violence created by building an economic structure that asks people to spend more and more time driving farther and farther. We would be making healthier places for everyone. We would treat this lost year as a portal to the future that we want.

When I say "we" here, by the way, I mean "we white people who still hold the majority of decision-making power in this country in every sector." Because "we" is me. "We" is you if you're not speaking up, speaking out, taking action. If we can't collectively learn from this lost year then we have truly lost our future.

2019 Blogging in Review

January: I got the year rolling with a post listing various bike challenges, not all of which I intended to try to complete. Speaking of challenges, compiling a list of everything I read in 2018 was a self-imposed challenge in an effort to give a shout-out to authors who enrich my life with their talents.

February: I decided to make it a lot easier to spotlight authors by compiling my list of books read in smaller chunks, hence the list of books I read in January.

March: I wrote quite a bit more in March. What I read in February, some musings on how differently we would interact on our streets and roads if we all moved the way we do in grocery stores, a round-up of some of my transportation reading (meaning articles, not books), a piece on why someone who owns a bike would use bikeshare, an introduction to my new e-bike Zelda!, and on the last day of the month the list of what I read in March.

April: My blogging energy continued into the cruelest month, sparked by the biking energy that goes with tackling the #30DaysOfBiking challenge. For a while there I thought I might actually do another run of 30 Days of Blogging to go with the biking, so I pushed out a lot of posts:

I even dropped in another round-up of transportation articles along the way.

May: Then life returned to normal and my blogging pace dropped. I posted the list of my April reading.

June: Another quiet month with only my list of May books.

July: You guessed it -- June reading list.

August: I should have blogged every single day of my wonderful trip to Copenhagen and London. I didn't. Too busy living the actual life to record it, and that's not an apology.

September: Caught up on the reading list with a July-August round-up, then posted on the innumerable thankless chores of digital housework.

October: Another "too busy to write" month.

November: Two-month list of September-October books read.

December: Something about the end of the year gets me writing again. I had a really wonderful experience with a great version of #BikeSchool, a Twitter chat I lead every so often, this time with guest hosts and the added tags #MoveEquity #WheelsMoveMe to invite in new participants. I belatedly reported on successful completion of the 2019 #coffeeneuring challenge as a series of bike dates with my sweetheart, discussed how my approach to holidays has evolved (and gotten much simpler and easier), and reviewed my year of bike challenge participation. I wrapped it up with a confession about nonfiction books I've started and haven't yet finished to create a bit of public accountability.

And that brings us to 2020. Such a nice, symmetrical number, that. Here's hoping that I round out this new year with enough reading, riding and writing to make me happy. I need high doses of each of these.

Books I'm Not Done Reading (Yet)

I'll be honest. I appreciate so much the research and thought that goes into writing a really well-done work of nonfiction. Over the years I've read hundreds of such works. And yet -- and yet....

These days I will stay up as if I'm a teenager hiding under the covers with a flashlight to finish a book. (That was a thing, children, back before cell phones. Yes, there was a time before cell phones, back when we chiseled our texts on stones and an emoji was called a "facial expression".)

But I don't do that for nonfiction. I do that for fiction. I do that for fantasy and science fiction and historical fiction, books that make me weep, books with a plot that demands resolution and characters whose lives need to make sense, in the end.

Nonfiction has become the thing I read if I'm really behind on sleep (thanks to all those previous up-too-late-finishing-because-I-have-to-know-what-happened nights). I'll learn something, but the writing won't draw me forward, page after page, toward that place where everything comes to rest. Instead my eyelids will come to rest.

In the spirit of true confession, here's a list of nonfiction books I started over the past year and have yet to finish even though I highly recommend each and every one. Possibly this confessional will prod me into finishing them.

How to Eat, by Thich Nhat Hanh, from his Mindfulness Essential series: A souvenir of a bookstore stop while at a conference -- I think possibly this is from DC while I was there for the gigantic Transportation Research Board annual meeting in 2018. Over the years I've owned and read many books on Buddhism and mindfulness meditation, including some of his. The deceptively simple precepts help me slow down and pay attention. I've read a few pages of this -- just snacking, you might say. Currently on loan to Second Daughter.
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein: I've been meaning to put this on the list ever since the America Walks webinar on the book and finally picked it up. I started on the plane in March 2019 on my way to the National Bike Summit but got so angry on every page I stopped reading a few chapters in.

If I am right that we continue to have de jure segregation, then desegregation is not just a desirable policy; it is a constitutional as well as a moral obligation that we are required to fulfill. 'Let bygones be bygones' is not a legitimate approach if we wish to call ourselves a constitutional democracy. - Richard Rothstein

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Rosanne Dunbar-Ortiz (@RDunbarO). This is everything they didn't teach us in school that we need to know. And yes, this too will make you angry.

By the way, if you don't know whose land you're living on you can look it up. I have lived on the lands of the Nimiipuu (Nez Perce), Schitsu'umsh (Coeur d'Alene), Spokane, and Duwamish peoples.
...the history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism--the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft. Those who seek history with an upbeat ending, a history of redemption and reconciliation, may look around and observe that such a conclusion is not visible, not even in utopian dreams of a better society. - Rosanne Dunbar-Ortiz

So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo (@IjeomaOluo). I follow Oluo on Twitter and have had this on my list for far too long. Started in October 2019. Another one that makes me angry -- by which I mean energized to work for change, by the way, not mad at the author.

White Supremacy is this nation's oldest pyramid scheme. Even those who have lost everything to the scheme are still hanging in there, waiting for their turn to cash out. - Ijeoma Oluo

The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City, by Eric Avila. Recommended by Peter Flax, former editor of Bicycling Magazine, in a string of tweets as a corrective to someone's lack of knowledge about the history of highways and what they did to segregate neighborhoods. Highly recommended for anyone working in transportation.

...-The modernist city) enthroned the machine, not ambulatory human beings, as the arbiter of urban spatial design, and it claimed the authority of reason and science, promising to rescue humanity from its self-destructive attachments to history, community, and identity. - Eric Avila

That's What She Said: What Men Need to Know (and Women Need to Tell Them) About Working Together, Joanne Lipman (@JoanneLipman): Recommended by a friend. Started in December 2019. If you're a man please read this.

Benevolent sexism is a well-meaning comment or attitude that ends up diminishing or undermining women. Just one example: after I guest-anchored the CNBC business program Squawk Box one day, I received a text from a businessman I know. It said, in its entirety, "You looked mighty cute on TV this morning.".... after I told this story to a group of women at a bank, the chief executive officer of the company -- the only man in the room -- taught us all how to think about this. "That's easy," he said. "The correct answer is: 'I assume you mean I sounded smart. Thank you.'" - Joanne Lipman

I have plenty of works of nonfiction I haven't even started, so this isn't my entire TBR (To Be Read) list. It's the TBF list: To Be Finished. Lots of learning -- and restful sleep -- lies ahead.

A note on local economies and these links: You should shop at a local, independently owned bookstore. Or check these out through your local library -- did you know they can do that with e-books too, if that's how you read? Links on this page are Amazon Affiliate links unless otherwise noted. I've never made a penny from Amazon but these links give you access to more information and reader reviews. If I ever do make anything I'll donate it to a local nonprofit, maybe Books to Prisoners (if you live in Seattle, Spokane, Olympia, or Portland, Oregon you can volunteer with them in person).

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