Riding The Life Cycle

Do you enjoy riding a bike? I may have done so when I first started with my pint-sized version, but growing up, my bike became a beast of burden. It was a large heavy version, painted red, if I remember, with a large metal carrier. It reliably served as a tool to make me financially independent. Bi-weekly I delivered meat for a butcher in my home-town of Winnipeg. Hard work, made much rougher by winter weather. I remember the day the carrier broke in the midst of a snow storm and I had to deliver my packages on foot. I never used the bike again.

Gone away for me with that experience went any positive emotions I may have had, like many others, about the free-wheeling joy that a bike could give. I prefer the treadmill for exercise and I get no pleasure from watching a writhing mass of racers competing on my television screen. That attitude carried over for me to cars. For me they have always been utilitarian, a means of getting from one place to another, rather a thing of beauty and worship. Maybe that is why I don’t enjoy driving the way I did twenty years ago.

Getting back to cycling, the word evokes an entirely different image in my mind these days. I am thinking about how our lives change over time. When we are younger, our motivations can be, and are often, entirely different from those we may have in later life. That’s obvious, isn’t it? No news to you. The life cycle rules. It continually rotates, showing us new faces to life. How much dissension can arise between generations because we are at different place in the cycle?

As we go through our lives, how our attitudes change! As young people, don’t we attack our futures with energy and enthusiasm? Aren’t we glad to graduate from the close supervision and control of parents, to the freedom of making our own choices about what we do with our time and lives? Often, we are fixated at ensuring our freedom; we seek to run away from the adult presence as much as we can. And that can occur just at that time when we could use adult counsel to the greatest positive effect. Often, it takes us some time to learn that lesson, sometimes, at a bitter cost.

Then we are parents and we begin to understand how our parents must have felt, watching as we thrashed about. We learn what it must have been like for our parents, coping with all the incoming, earning a living, caring for and raising offspring, engineering positive futures for themselves and the family, negotiating the parental partnership of a couple with individual needs who are Moms and Dads, and perhaps, finally , worrying about aging parents. Did we think we got enough attention from our parents when we were young, or when we moved away? Are there resentments about what we view as favoritism between ourselves and our siblings? What a potent emotional mix is contained in that whole living process! These elements are the essence of what makes up the cycle as it turns.

How about now? Speaking for myself, now we are older. We are living with the aging process. Modern medicine has spread that period over a longer time than it was for our parents. Here we reap what we sow. We can be living with situations where we are often just an afterthought for those offspring we spent a lifetime raising. Or in whom we did not invest enough in the views of those beholders. We were busy in our days and our children are just as busy doing what we did in our day. The shoe is very much on the other foot. We might wish we could see more of them. And the grandkids! We might be worrying how we will be negotiating the steep slope of diminishing capacities. We may be worrying about whether our life will outlast our resources. What happens if we lose our partner? That happens a lot, doesn’t it? On the positive side, oldsters’ increasing political and financial power has led to much more in the way of services for our cohort in developed-nation environments. We can keep busy and healthy in productive ways, and be less of a burden on offspring.

Hold on for just a moment! Here’s a thought! Our life cycle is a tiny one in a much grander system of vastly greater dimension. We humans matter because we are succeeding in changing the history of the universe.

Human beings are relatively recent arrivals in the life cycle of our planet, having appeared as distinct they tell us, only some 70,000 years ago. Uniquely, with hands and thumbs , and crucially*, our capacity for learning, we have thrived and subjugated, even eliminated, our competitors on this globe. This capacity for learning meant that we did not have to spend centuries, as did other species, mutating an adaptation to our environment. Instead, we learned that, through cooperative effort, we could alter our environments to suit us. In contrast to other species, though physically weak, and challenged by our need to shelter our offspring for years before they could survive independently, we humans turned this handicap to our advantage, pressed to work together in larger groups to assure survival. That capacity was directed to a multitude of other purposes. We have been so successful, (look at our exploding population,) that we are ravaging the resource capacity of our globe in terms of food, water and even clean air at habitable temperatures. Most other species have either been domesticated for our needs or have disappeared.

Will we be carrying our circle of life, ultimately, to other planets, when we have totally despoiled all the resources of our own? Do humans have a role to play in that cosmic arena? Round and Round?

What ultimate fate shall it be for me-bicycle or treadmill?

*See: Harari- Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind. Mclelland and Stewart, 2014