The Big and the Small, Fighting in Space

I went for another bike ride around Josh Harris’ suburban neighborhood. This happened at around 7 pm, after the sun had finished having its way with the world of Austin, Texas. There were funny clouds overhead, pink and purple and blue. Sometimes when you look at the sky, you can’t help but say a prayer that goes, “Yeah right. That looks like a Hollywood thing.”

There is a weird way of thinking that you and I can achieve that our distant ancestors could not. This occurs when we are riding upon a fast moving vehicle, and the world is blurring around us, traveling at a faster speed than it wants to. The grass blades and the sky and the cows in the field do not want to be blurry. They want to be clear and true and real.

But, when we see them as blurred we see more of the world, our mind expanding to encompass more of existence than previously thought possible. “Yes!” I gasp, “Technology!”

When we do this, and we see the world on a bike, or in a car, or a train, or through the Google Earth, we see that our little world, the one we walk through every day, is not  so big, and that the problems we face are quiet things compared to the great and humming universe.

I rode through the neighborhood adjacent to Josh’s house, the one where the houses are painted with the drab but varying colors of the unfortunately named “Crayola Multi-Cultural Crayons” that Lauren bought me for my birthday one year. A little chihuahua dog came running out of a house, chasing after my bike and chirping his little dog chirp. I sped up and out-ran him.

If I had sprung for the more expensive bike helmet at the bicycle store, I could have pressed a button near the ear-part of the helmet and had the dog’s chirps translated for me. He would say, “SLOW DOWN! SLOW DOWN! I CANNOT UNDERSTAND YOU! YOU ARE A BLURRED MACHINE-MAN!”