My friend’s son is into mountain biking. I don’t know much about the sport. I know I like the looks of mountain bikes more than that of a ten speed, the lines being cleaner and the bikes themselves looking stronger, but that is the beginning and end of my input on the subject. He’s preparing for a race and as I asked him question after question his mom suggested he show me a race on the computer.
It was eye opening to say the least.
As a bike flew down dusty, curvy trails, whizzed into tunnels and sped dangerously close to trees I said, ‘Are you ever scared?’
‘Sometimes,’ he said, with breathtaking honesty.
And then, a beat later he added, ‘It’s all about trusting yourself and your bike.’
I felt that funny feeling I get when I know I have heard something I am going to dwell on, turn over endlessly in my mind and maybe adopt as a new belief.
It’s about trusting yourself and your bike. I’ve never met a bike I’ve had any sort of relationship with but the idea of a bike as a metaphor for life danced in my head and made me think about the idea of trust. The role it plays in life, in our relationships, but mostly the idea of trusting yourself.
*
I was on my first trip to BC in twenty years and I was dizzy by how much everything had changed. Landing at the airport and seeing the shops, the brightness of the place after Heathrow, the impossible beauty of the mountains as they stood in the distance, I returned in my memory to the person who had left a much smaller city, a person who was struggling after a bit of illness, a bad but necessary breakup, and a career change I still question. The friend I was on my way to visit had a front row seat for all of it. She had seen me when I was in her words ‘scary thin’, had picked me up from a visit to the hospital where she literally helped me get dressed and had shared her circle of extraordinary friends with me. We had danced at the Side Door, a bar long closed, cooked together in the kitchen of our shared home and become friends. The kind you always trust to have your best interests at heart.
I had big plans for my visit, some to do with family, some to do with promoting my books. Much to do with reconnecting with old friends. One day my friend and I went shoe shopping on West 4th and once I recovered from the shock of the prices I thoroughly enjoyed browsing, buying a new pair of Converse trainers. The last pair I ordered online felt flimsy and soon began to squeak. I thought I might have been duped. The pair I picked up had the weight I was used to.
Once back in the car my friend asked where I wanted to go next, and I asked if there was a bookstore nearby. We ended up at Indigo on Granville and 10th.
My old neighbourhood. Where I had lived for four years. I remembered when the shop was a diner and I remember when the bookstore opened. I smiled as I recalled spending rainy afternoons picking up book after book, reading the first sentence and making a little pile to buy. I still choose books the same way – nothing that starts with dialogue and nothing first person. A first line that makes me think, ‘wow, someone wrote that’. As I browsed the shelves and talked to the very kind staff about my books (first line in one: ‘Bullets sing.’ – I’m still proud of that – and in my second book: ‘May is an awkward month to start over.’) I felt the enormity of where I was. Thought about how much I had changed, of course on the outside, but the most profound changes were on the inside. I felt more were coming, and I braced myself.
‘When we finish here, I’d like to walk over and see the apartment where I used to live,’ I said. She got it. She understood.
So as the sun lit our way we walked over. Stood in the street. I pointed out the apartment where I didn’t so much live as survive, struggling with who I was when I lived there, and who I wanted to be. I worked to feel compassion for the young woman who was dealing with so much change, and growth, and I apologised to her for letting her down. For not dreaming bigger. For accepting things she did not deserve.
‘It’s smaller than I remember,’ I said.
As we walked away I thought about this, how the small building and the small flat loomed so large in my life. As I wished whoever lived there now, in the pretty little building so close to so many things a happier time than I had, I turned and walked away.
When we returned to my friend’s gorgeous home, a home that vibrated with the family love that echoed inside, she started dinner while I spoke to her son about mountain biking. It was then he shared his wisdom about trust.
I am surmising because I have no intention of ever finding out for myself that in a mountain bike race, you see the troubles coming at you, the solid and imposing trees, the dips and drops in the path, the sudden turns. You have time to react, recalibrate, prepare. As you climb on a bike you anticipate what is going to happen. Wheels roll, pedals turn. Gears shift. Life doesn’t work that way. Things come at you suddenly on a random Tuesday that blindside you. And things happen gradually, as if in slow motion, and no matter how hard you might pump the brake, the movement continues. You can stop a bike. You can change direction. This is not the case with life. All you can do is hold on and learn to deal with the bumps. The very best you can do is to trust yourself in the race of life.
Later, meeting her son in Whistler I watched as he somehow defied gravity and jumped a flight of steps with his bike and without so much as a flick of the wrists. I wanted to ask him how he did it but I also didn’t want to come across as his mom’s weird friend. I figured I was already dancing with that as it was, with my awe at the beauty of BC, my concern over all the bears people told me I was going to see, and my sudden fascination with a sport I’d never much thought about before.
Still, it kept crossing my mind, what he said, as I sat on ferries and buses and dealt with the landscape of my past in all its beauty and its sorrow.
What if I had trusted myself more, earlier in life? What if I’d trusted myself to study creative writing instead of broadcast journalism? Trusted myself to walk away from bad relationships believing there was something better waiting for me?
What if I had trusted myself more with my own life?
My friend’s son is sixteen years old. You can tell from his quiet calm demeanour, his lovely manners, the way he thinks, that he’s going places in this world. I just hope he does it with all of his limbs intact.