My body camera slips downward and I don’t realize until I get home that it captures my ascent up the steepest hill (of many) on my regular route Traveling at the Speed of Bike around my suburb-city, where I’m on week three of sheltering-in-place due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is a hill that once challenged me and now fills me with gratitude as I shift to my lowest gear and rock Attica back and forth while eventually gripping my drop handlebars and digging deep within my soul to keep moving forward.
As I stop to sip water, I thank the dear Lord because here, more than ever, on this hill on a little side street that doesn’t even look that bad when you’re driving yet is relentless on bike, I can feel my lungs expand like an accordion, like the sunrise and sunset, like the ocean, like all of creation and life concentrated in one single moment in time (that nonrenewable resource with which we’ve all been temporarily gifted).
And I know that, for today, I can still breathe. I can still live. And I can somehow still climb the hill of fear that is coronavirus.
Traveling at the Speed of Bike 