I went out for a really hilly bike ride on roads I’d never tried before. It was quite spectacular and I discovered a secret little wild camping spot that I shall be taking the family back to this summer.
I love cycling for all the reasons you can google for yourself and what’s more I get to observe my thinking while I’m at it. (Hiking’s the same.) Something about the mind-body unit being mostly on autopilot during these activities, seems to free up capacity.
I noticed two different modes of thinking.
The first I’ll call ‘active’ or ‘analytical’ thinking. This was all intellectual: the mind having a chat with itself, judging what was happening, and dragging my feelings with it, wherever it went. It fell into two camps:
🗣 Positive/self-congratulatory (things going the way ego wants), e.g. what a good route I chose; isn’t the weather great; I’m glad I’ve got my gilet with me; good grief this scenery is phenomenal!
🗣 Negative/self-critical (things not going the way ego wants), e.g. oh no, not another f***ing hill, this was a bad choice; it’s not quite as warm as I’d hoped; now what’s that annoying sound from the bike?
Back and forth, back and forth, arguing with itself, mostly (e.g. “Blimey it’s chilly up here… ah, but remember, you were going to put on a thin vest as a base layer but instead you chose a merino t-shirt, it could be so much worse…”)
It’s enough to drive a man insane!!! 🤪
(Incidentally, another two flavours of this kind of thinking are daydreaming & worrying, but that’s another story for another time.)
But then…
There was presence. The witnessing. Not just of what was happening, but of EVERYTHING. Let’s call this ‘passive’ or ‘perceptual’ thinking, with its main characteristic being the lack of mental activity & analysis.
At one point, I was cycling up a ludicrously steep hill in a beautiful woodland that took me right back to the Belgian Ardennes. Initially there was the usual background noise of positive & negative active thinking, and then, something in the alchemy of the moment made it all fall away.
✨
The hairs stood up on the back of my neck, a silence descended (in my head) and I could feel the space I was inhabiting, in relation to all around me.
The sounds of the forest seemed to get turned up and the colours were just mind-blowing. I could smell the soil. There was no real judgement of any of it… just an all-encompassing awe.
Now, there were loads of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ things happening concurrently in that moment (e.g. the memory of my Belgian tour, the blissful remoteness of my location; the pain in my legs, my laboured breathing, the damned clicking when I was out of the saddle) but they all just went into the mix as pure perception, without any analysis.
There was no Giles, no commentary, just this.
And here’s the thing. That’s what I remember most clearly about that 5 hour bike ride. Not all the celebrating & griping of the dualistic mind, but that 30 seconds or so of non-duality. Just experiencing it all.
Being it all.
It’s powerful stuff, reality, and it’s always there, waiting for us to fall back into. We don’t need forests to experience it - it can happen in really extreme, or really mundane moments.
And I think it’s all just about attention.
Is our attention on that exquisite, expansive sensation of life itself?
Or is it being drawn by the mind?
Both are options!
💟
Giles
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Giles P Croft
Two special types of 1: ‘Active/Analytical’ thinking, explored