I Am Climbing the Hill, the Hill is Lifting Me Up

   Sometimes I think the reason Zen Buddhism exists is to remind people of the laws of physics.  So we can do what?  I'm not sure.  Maybe so we can stop running against the invisible wind, stop hitting the invisible wall.  There's all that real wind and those real walls to contemplate and experience and test our behavior with.  It seems the invisible obstacles are given far more substance than their atoms would allow were they real. Alan Watts has said our perceptions fly in the face of hard science, as well as Eastern religion:
   "...the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination    which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East."
   I think I agree with him.  People tend to want a direct line to God, but how can you do that when you can't even partner with gravity?
   As you can probably tell by now, I like to ride my bike.  I also like to run and walk.  The farther and wider afield, the better.  It seems to bring me into partnership with things like gravity, and life; REAL life, not the "separate ego in a bag of skin" life. I love to read blogs like the oatmeal, and bikesnob NYC, because, like me, the authors realize how silly it is to run ultramarathons or ride your bike obsessively when one's survival doesn't depend on it, and how there are people out there truly struggling every day while we whine and moan about our "gear".  And yet we still do it.  The wanderlust, the sufferfest, or whatever you want to call it - it makes the food at the end more delicious, the bed softer, the house (that you're not fixing because you're out playing on your bicycle) more like home.  It shows you, in intricate detail, what the invisible winds and walls are all about, and what world is there when you can move past them.  David Goggins, a Navy SEAL who began running ultramarathons with no training in 2005 in order to raise money for wounded veterans and their families, and who now has run some of the hardest races in existence, as well as competed in the Ultraman triathlon (all with a congenital hole in his heart), said it very simply, "At around mile 75, I start to find out who David Goggins is."

"The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego."
                                                                                                                    -Alan Watts

 I started to accept physics as a reality fairly recently.  And I mean, I've accepted it as a phenomenon whose existence I am actively a part of, not just as something that happens to me from the outside.  Perhaps it's because of age, or I've just partially snapped out of my fantasy world.  It never occurred to me after about 30 years of running, but the revelation came quickly once I started cycling.  One day, blammo, "I'm not propelling my body through space, I'm spinning a wheel.  Just spin the wheel and let physics take care of the rest - why do you think you have to do everything?!"

"Why not sit back, have a drink, and let Physics do the work?"

   What a wonderful circumstance, not to have to force everything around, like you know better than the Universe where to put stuff!  When I think back on all that wasted energy, I'm embarrassed. 

 "The world outside your skin is just as much you as the world inside...There is a feeling of the ground holding you up, and of hills lifting you when you climb them."

But I'm glad the ground and I have come to an understanding.