Robby biking around Philly, 2017
In your guts
Lately I’ve been wondering how you identify when something feels ‘good’ in your gut. We talk a lot about trusting your gut when something feels ‘bad,’ which is obviously an important skill, but I don’t believe a good feeling is simply the absence of a bad one. I want to know good when I feel it.
We tend to be skeptical when things are good. I am generally a positive person but even I struggle with this. I wonder if it’s a collective fear of vulnerability. I also wonder if hopefulness is inherently delusional. When you have hope, you are putting your faith in something uncertain. You take your hands off the handle bars.
But just because you took your hands off the handle bars doesn’t mean you’re giving up control. Your body learns to maintain balance in a new way. You activate your core. Sometimes you don’t even realise you’ve been using your core until the next day, when muscles you wouldn’t use otherwise are sore. Biking with no hands is a skill that involves letting feeling override thinking which means knowing what the feeling is in the first place which requires being able to identify certainty when you feel it in your guts.
Then again, as the wise Bill Callahan once said,
And what comes after certainty?
A world of mystery.
December 2023