1. Yesterday afternoon, in a gesture of solidarity with the climate-change strikers, I rode my bike to the park.
2. It was a little unnerving at first. I recognized most of the plants but the light was very different that what I’m used to in the morning. Somehow I had been dropped into a parallel universe.
3. I thought about something I read not too long ago about why time seems to speed up as we age, which is that we tend to do the same thing over and over. Our minds become acclimated to this pattern and less attuned to the passage of time. I think this is probably true, and not necessarily always bad, either. Habit is comforting, and it’s good to be comforted, particularly when — another thing about aging — we are increasingly exposed to the problems of the world and increasingly aware of our impotence to do much to solve them, or at least in a timeframe where we can expect to see the results.
4. One thing about the afternoon is that the butterflies were awake. I’m pretty sure this is a ‘painted lady’ or via Wikipedia: ‘Vanessa cardui is a well-known colorful butterfly, known as the painted lady, or formerly in North America as the cosmopolitan.’ If I were a butterfly I would prefer the gender neutral ‘cosmopolitan.’ (But that’s a different protest.)
5. The autumn crocus were lining up for a demonstration.
6. As I contemplated the state of the world, it was hard to feel optimistic. I thought about a tweet I read by a local bike advocate in response to the mayor’s statements about the uncompromising need for ‘profound change’ to fight global warming. In the tweet, the bike advocate talked about how it took him two years of advocacy and fighting to get one parking spot removed in front of his kid’s school so that they could install a bike rack. New York City has something like three million parking spots, which means it would take six million years of community board meetings to get rid of them. Where to even begin?
7. I couldn’t worry about it right now. Here, with the painted ladies glowing in the sun, I felt like time had stopped.
