No Driving Day

Today I said no to the car. And yes to not driving. Essentially the same thing, but I'm trying to keep things in the positive--I am, after all, saying "yes" to the universe!

The Mighty Mississippi

My daughter and I started our day with a morning bike ride, hitting the local entrance to the Midtown Greenway bike trail at about 8 am to avoid the really hot part of the day. We took that trail over to the Grand Rounds bike trail which goes along the Mississippi River on the West River Parkway. The route was lousy with bikers--and it was fun to see so many people out on this hot and steamy morning. We went across the Ford bridge over to St. Paul (it's funny how the online bike maps really end at St. Paul, though it's so clearly part of the city and a totally cool place to be as far as I can see). The Ford bridge lets out at a Ford Plant (unsurprisingly), which had a few cars in it (a holiday?), but the parking lot looked largely as if no one had parked there for a while--it was punctuated everywhere by weeds growing through cracks. We explored this area a little bit--Highland, I think--which mostly involved time spent in the Barnes & Noble to cool off and noting the local public library where we decided that our library card probably wouldn't work because it's in St. Paul, not Minneapolis. No wonder St. Paulians are sensitive. Are they? I'm am only guessing since, because I've clearly not given St. Paul nearly the attention it deserves, I assume others are as equally narrow minded!

After we were more-or-less cooled off, we started back up the East River Parkway, overshot the Lake St./Marshall bridge (you know whose fault that was), and had to turn around and double back to cross it. Normally this wouldn't be a big deal to my 16-year-old daughter who is, after all, 1) much younger than I, and  2) (I think I can safely say) an athlete. But it is almost 11 am by now, and the humidity is high, and the heat index is higher, somewhere around 96. We are sweaty. We are hot. We are also probably dehydrated. And we have a small (and I mean small, because it really is flat in the Twin Cities) hill to ride up to get to the bridge. I won't recount the exchange between us. Suffice it to say, it was a great opportunity to explore mother-daughter dynamics.

When we got home, cooled off, and she had forgiven me (I think my making her lunch helped), I kept my commitment to modes of transportation that involved feet, bikes, buses, or light rail (all of which we had readily at our disposal). My daughter read and watched some television. I worked happily and finally finished a syllabus for a class I'll be teaching in the fall (two more to go). Late in the afternoon I offered a trip over to a part of town we had driven through the day before on our way home from the ice rink that looked interesting. There was a bus that went straight there. Or the light rail too. But we opted to stay in--we permitted ourselves this because Weather.com recommended that we "limit outdoor exposure" (the heat index was up to 104 at this point). My daughter lamented after a nice dinner together that we had "wasted" the day doing nothing. I can readily remember my own impatience with sitting around at her age, and really even until about a decade or so ago I struggled with "doing nothing" or feeling like I was "wasting time" if I wasn't doing something I thought of as "productive." I pointed out to her the nice time we had spent reading, chatting, cooking dinner together. And (while I admit to having a bit of an aversion to television) that it wasn't such a bad thing to spend some time watching a cooking show or two on a really hot afternoon.


These days my impatience is as much about not getting internal work done as it is about the external accomplishments. Why has it taken me so long to heal these old, tired, wounds? How is it that at age 51 I'm still trying to grow up? My mind is ready to move on to the next phase, my spirit, it seems, not so much. Perhaps I need to heed the universe's message: the heat index is high, and my internal Self moves at its own pace. So I surrender to the heat and the humidity, relinquish the struggle, and give up needing to make something happen. The experience of impatience can be a reminder (if we let it) that we can choose to do something different; we can give up whatever timeline we have and be free right in the moment.