Re-enchanting life
Monday holiday. The world is a screensaver. Motionless, silent, it is wet with a drizzle that blurs the images settling on my retina and is only really visible when it touches things and changes their color. The asphalt becomes shiny. The concrete takes on a darker hue. Freshly released from their buds, the leaves on the trees take on the fluorescent green of young, spirited shoots that have been moistened. They stand out almost violently against the gray of the pale light filtered by joyless clouds.
As usual, I'm alone on my bike. I set off early in the morning, after eating a piece of toast, drinking a coffee, and kissing my girlfriend goodbye. I decide on my route as I go along, improvising as I go.
Heading north, the road to Sainte-Brigitte belongs entirely to me. A rare occurrence. The air is cool without being unpleasant. This windless morning allows me to hear the sounds of those who inhabit the surrounding trees, their chirping reaching me in that strange way that the Socks sky has Socks carrying sounds and making them rounder and deeper. My Tires on the wet asphalt. The gravel on the side of the road crackles as I pass. I am here, alone, in my head, and the world is fabulous once again.
I am obsessed with the idea of re-enchanting our lives. My own, at least. But I also see in the distress of my fellow human beings the desire to reach beyond the surface that is offered to them, to touch the wonder in this life that most of us are convinced will also be our paradise.
For me, alcohol, drugs, and consumerism are not so much ways of numbing ourselves as they are a quest for meaning, an attempt to find something that makes us happy by lighting a light within us that we sometimes fumble around for a long time before finding the switch.
Mine lights up the moment I get on the saddle. And sometimes, the light it produces is almost blinding because it's so beautiful. Like now.
In Socks the Calvary coast, the llamas are in their place. I greet them silently. A rare car passes me. I am barely aware of it. I am lost in myself, my thoughts fueled by the repetition of physical movement, in a sporting meditation that allows me to escape from work, obligations, and the anxieties of a life that is meticulously planned, regulated, and filled to the brim with a thousand things that generally seem unavoidable to me, and yet find no space in my mind this morning.
After heading down towards Lac-Beauport, I turn towards Lac-Saint-Charles, go back up and turn left into the small streets parallel to Boulevard Talbot to reach the Grande Ligne. I am still in my mind and at the same time in this space that has been given to me. A hare crosses the street in front of me. I shout something silly at it. Further on, two marmots watch me.
I feel so good I could scream. The drizzle continues its patient work of widespread humidification. I resist the urge to stop at Pascal Le Boulanger; dinner is probably waiting for me at home. I think about loneliness. I think about how I have long considered myself a social animal, but that my favorite state is still the calm I feel this morning, when the world resembles an episode of The Walking Dead, minus the zombies. It is a chosen, desired solitude. It allows me to look inward while opening myself up to the world. Contact with others will be all the more pleasant afterwards, after this break from worldly agitation.
The world seems more beautiful to me. More vivid. I breathe in the damp air deeply and feel alive. Alive with excess, with overflow.
Alongside other special moments, encounters, but above all moments of intimacy stolen from the cruel constraints of our high-performance lives, with those I love, it is mornings like this that re-enchant my life. They are precious, but I need to linger over them to realize their value. Like other moments of inner peace, of discovering the wonderful side of existence, they cannot be commanded. We can only put ourselves in a favorable position to receive them. It is also for them that I ride as often as possible. In the hope of catching new ones.
So I try to soak it all in when it happens, to feel every second passing through me, flowing through me. My bike is a revelation that shows me life as it should be. Magical.