Mountain Biking in the Winter of 2004

One winter morning I found myself lugging a mountain bike onto a rack at 7am on a 10 degree morning.

It was cold!…but sunny and remarkably clear.

By 8am there were more than 10 of us headed into the woods.

Within 10 minutes one of the bikes decided to go no further. It happened in a beautiful little pine woods. Frost hung on the trees, everything was crunchy, the sun beamed down through the branches.

It was so harsh and beautiful that my mind became ‘stuck’ in those woods.

I was in my early fifties. All of a sudden time changed its meaning.

Time had always been this ‘treadmill’ of life events. One thing followed another in a known progression.

For a brief time in a very cold pine woods my life literally froze.

Albert Einstein first formulated the possibility of a ‘relative’ time. Later, numerous thought experiments in physics attempted to demonstrate certain perceptual paradoxes.

At its heart, time is a human perception. How we see the world and how the world progresses is critically a human/surroundings link.

My perception in the woods on that morning was the result of unique conditions. Conditions I had never experienced.

That morning taught me to be more open, more understanding, and more receptive to the unknown.

We stayed in the woods more than an hour. All of us were closer friends at the end.