The night I became a passenger in my own skin

A perspective on sentience, from a weird bike ride in an ordinary place

Welcome to the pages of my Travel Journal, featuring meandering portrayals of life on the road. For lighter reading, you might prefer my series of Sketches.

I wrote this a few years ago, and it still comes back to haunt me. It attempts to describe one of the strangest nights of my life – a psychological flutter that appeared to come out of the blue. (No funny substances, honest.) I think I’ve shared this once before but can’t remember where, so here it is again, with a few tweaks, including a footnoted helping hand from Jim Carrey.

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Flicking through my Facebook feed last night, I stumbled on a post from a friend that spooked me. It brought disappointment, and a little anger, and somehow out of that sudden knot of emotion grew the simple urge to get on my bike and ride – just ride into the night.

That vaguely abstract idea mushroomed into a consuming impulse, and with it came a torrent of energy, optimism, and a glittering awareness of both the minute and the massive. This was one of the strangest experiences of my life; my synapses were massaged into a fizzing, curiously enervated stillness – like the potency within the tip of a conductor’s raised baton, reeled into a weightless pause before the downbeat’s release. And I knew that within the spirit of that moment was the essence of something I wanted to be.

"Initially, pilgrimage […] had been perceived and represented as ‘anti-travel’. In Christian dogma and culture, curiositas, that is, curiosity about the world, is a sin, related to the Original Sin and the Transgression, hence identified with humanity’s Fall.”¹