A Bike Ride down Introspection Lane ... 2014

Henry Hudson Trail in New Jersey

Lindbergh taking off from Roosevelt Field

An occasional weekend morning activity of dusting off my bicycle on an 8 miles round-trip on the picturesque  Henry Hudson Trail, that I am fortunate to live very close to, is much a fodder for the soul as that for the flesh and muscle.

Tire pressure checked, and the seat is raised a couple of inches (I have now overcome the fear of my toes not touching the ground while on the seat and in motion ... a greater confidence in Newton's First Law) I remember Charles Lindbergh's The Spirit of St. Louis (the book I found exciting to read many times as a nerdy teenager obsessed with aeromodeling) and his preparations for what turned out to be the first successful trans-Atlantic flight at Roosevelt Field, New York, in 1927!

My bike ride is meant to be my fight against my personal Battle of the Bulge .. the inches on my girth that I am striving to eliminate .. and, hence, the need to make it a daily habit. But my daily schedule is out-of-kilter these days. 

How prophetic were you, Tom Friedman, when you interviewed Nandan Nilekani and published The World is Flat. Very smart choice of words ... you did not make many scientists spin in their graves by making a hypothesis about the Earth, which continues to be round; but the World that inhabits the Earth is, indeed, becoming flat! The Earth continues to rotate as well as revolve ... causing time zone differences, long and short days, and the not-sufficiently-understood human attempt in some parts of the world to compensate through the use of the Daylight Savings Time! How to make the time zone differences work for you, rather than becoming their victim, will be my topic for another blog.

The trail gives you interesting sights of flora and fauna (an occasional deer, lots of squirrels and ground-hogs, snails that attempted to "cross the road") and sounds (owls and woodpeckers, the distant hoot of the train to New York), and interesting interactions with homo sapiens of different ages, racial backgrounds, joggers, strollers, and fellow bikers. I am fortunate to be in a neighborhood that offers this cultural diversity, and amuse myself with the patterns of behavior. Caucasians and African Americans will invariably greet you with a smile and a "good morning". Asians greet you with a bow, in addition to the smile - the "good morning" is somewhat muffled. It is this sharing of goodwill that makes America! It is not about analyzing whether the persons greeting you really meant what they said, it is the gesture to make another person feel good. And, then, I find my fellow-compatriots ... some feel that my greeting is an intrusion, others anticipate the greeting and look the other way (and I spare them the intrusion), and yet others have taught me how to accept rejection, which I now take in my stride. I forgive, and move on!

Marlboro Memorial Cemetery and Mausoleum

The trail takes me across an elegant, newly constructed cemetery. Until 15 years ago, this used to be a cute little airport - Marlboro Airport - that fell on bad times. I remember the days when I took my children there, and enthusiastic pilots would take them up for joy rides for about $25 each. They would go up in their single-engine Cessnas north-east toward the Statue of Liberty, or south-west toward Philadelphia. The airport had some mishaps due to undercarriages getting tangled in high tension power lines to the east of the runway, declared unsafe and shut down. What was once the runway is now beautifully paved with interlocking bricks and runs through the length of the cemetery. My admiring the beauty of the cemetery is a testimony to my Americanization. Back in India, cemeteries and crematoria (mostly, open air in those days) were undesirable places to go near, more so at certain times of the day, with a lot of aura about dissatisfied souls and ghost stories. One of my close friends and I, in our teenage years, embarked on visits to such socially out-of-bounds places to demystify the fears to ourselves, beyond any shadow of doubt.

I am benchmarking my time-since-the-start as I pass all these landmarks. I have done better today than I did yesterday, and have way surpassed my performance from a couple of months ago. The task is now to make it a habit, measure my success by my circumference and other stats, and the elevation it offers to my soul!

Now, it is time to cook a nice Sunday meal. Sanjeev Kapoor has done his bit in motivating me, and I have bitten off on the bait!!