NOTICE: I’m not sure why I’m doing this, but on my way home today I travel only one block south of usual and slow my pace to a crawl, to only fast enough so that I don’t fall over with my bike. And then I start looking at every single thing in front of me. I don’t want to miss any details, so I make note of the angles of the telephone poles, the different styles of numbers on each of the houses, the rolled up newspaper on a front step, an empty parking space. As soon as I note each piece of information, I release it. I’m not trying to remember these facts, or collect them in order to formulate a sort of conclusion. Like I said, I’m not sure what I’m doing. Maybe I’m trying to remind myself that this world is much larger than I sometimes believe. That I haven’t been there, done that. Or maybe I’m just trying to distract my brain, confuse it, and effectively break the downward spiral of thoughts that plague me as of late. Then I start to notice details that aren’t so easy to put into words: the pattern of leaves on the sidewalk, the bend of a metal street sign, the shift in color of a painted wall. I give up on the effort to assign names to the things I see. My eyes are darting around with the goal of quantity over quality. While the one side of my brain is making sure I move just fast enough to keep the bicycle balanced, the other side of my brain is engrossed in capturing every nuance of this city block. My head is full of thoughts without meaning or purpose. And as the sidewalk narrows to just barely a handlebar’s width - the space between a sidewalk-planted tree and a row house’s front steps (overtop upturned concrete pieces of an erupting walkway) - I gather my breath to monitor its slow release. With all the confidence of someone who has nothing to lose, I continue through. A single pedal scrape against the step or handlebar-flail against the tree could mean failure (which, admittedly, would only amount to having to put my foot down). In order to survive I must immediately and completely erase my brain to concentrate on only this one challenge. Once on the other side, I have the sensation that an entire world that had just been revealed to me was suddenly taken away and then restored. And I’m still not sure what I was trying to accomplish, but I think I did it.