Reconsidered

Dogma dominates the public discourse.  Pundit, politician, persuader, you’re supposed to stake out your position and cling to it like Baby Huey with his lollipop; if you modify your view, even the tiniest bit, you’re castigated as a “flip-flopper” and considered a traitor to your party, your people, and everything that’s holy (or unholy depending on your God.)

But you know what?  There’s really nothing better than having your mind changed.  (Although I could be wrong about that.)  

It’s actually a relief, and a gift, to see things in a new light.  Exhibiting what one of my grad school professors, Bill Talbott, always called “epistemological humility” is liberating.  It allows you to grow and develop as a thinker and a human being (noting that those two are often at odds.)

So, when you arrive at the traditional Thursday night meeting place with a plan in mind, you can either bang your spoon on the high chair until people come to their senses and see things your way, or can come to your own senses and allow the winds of more popular (or, at least, more forcefully expressed) opinion to take you where it may.

And when you do so, (and when you continue doing so, even after an initial destination is discarded halfway through), you’re rewarded with just what you wanted all along—even if you didn’t know it at the time.

The beach was perfect for a fire that could be stood around rather than just in front of, and saving the covered location for another night when—unlike this overcast by dry fall evening—covering would be called, for made perfect sense even to those whose minds were almost made up.

Positions were modified, directions were changed, before you knew it, an offshore breeze was stoking the flames enough to turn strangers to converts.

Eventually, every chair was burned and the assembled re-assembled elsewhere, not what anyone planned for, but a plan perfectly executed nonetheless.

Cackle

Fun doesn’t just happen.  

You have to grab it by the proverbial short hairs (or longer ones if you’re sporting a wig) and shake it into life.  You have to pedal uphill and cackle and scream and pour whiskey down your throat while howling at the new crescent moon seen through a hole in the black sun.  You have to get lost in practically your own neighborhood by being confused about which is east and which is west and whether the twain shall meet.  You gotta have heart; miles and miles and miles of heart, even if the ride itself is only a few kilometers long.

Fun is out there, waiting to be seized, but it expects a bit of effort on your part; it’s not going to just drop into your lap like candy into your Halloween bag in the fancy parts of town where they give out whole Hershey bars and double-packs of Reese’s Peanut Butter cups.  In order to wallow in fun’s warm embrace, you have to remember that efficiency isn’t the only virtue and that if you like riding bikes, then you like riding bikes and that the extra hill means you get to be rolling around for longer than you would if you weren’t following someone who imagines they know where they’re going, but don’t really—or only, generally, not specifically.

It’s fun to complain, too, of course, which is part of the fun.

I’m not sure you can crash a party if you are the party; I do believe, however, that anyone brave enough to invite an unspecified number of somewhat-costumed cyclists into their home, table, and liquor cabinet, is surely not someone who’s going to be scared by even the spookiest of Halloween-themed goodies and entertainments.  There were treats galore; the trick was all graciousness and hospitality.

Fun was had; made manifest by the dark magic of the season just begun; hocus-pocus, voila: fun and more fun in scary amounts.