Saturday, May 15, 2010

In which the author is delightfully suprised...

Thursday morning, I woke up from fitful sleep a earlier than usual and a little more concerned than usual about getting to my lab to treat my culture fly cells with their proper chemicals for an experiment I needed to run...Otherwise a completely normal Thursday (wishing that it could be Friday), and I made it though my morning routine and off on my bicycle without much ado.

Gliding along, I suddenly remembered! Thursday May 13th, Bike to Work Day! Excellent! I have been looking forward to this day for at least a month. There were e-mail postings about various stations on campus with stations to celebrate the day, but I passed by the train station on my route I was surprised to see people there--happy, waving canvas "Bike to Work" book bags. I smiled and waved, but kept going because I was already mostly passed and planned to stop at the station closest to my lab. My energy boosted even more since my realization of Bike to Work Day, and looking forward to what else I might see.

Coming up the the big traffic light, there were quite a few bicyclist, especially for being earlier than than the usual bike "rush-hour." I gleefully biked across the road with my fellow bicycles, and shortly after crossing onto campus, we all converged on a booth with more happy people cheering us on. Some of the bikers stopped, but I kept going until I reached the station by my work. From those happy volunteers, I proudly recorded my 7 miles of round trip mileage and received my book bag--a symbol of my first ever Bike to Work Day.

Later one of my friends who takes the same bike route as I, mentioned she stopped at the train station and was very ceremoniously wreathed with bag around her neck, which kind of made me wish I'd stopped there too. We talked about how cool it is to be cheered on in your morning about something we already do, that is a good choice we have made but has become just a part of life.

It is good to be reminded and encouraged in these things. I once read a quote by George MacDonald (I couldn't find it on-line) the essence of which was talking about all the little things we do each day the little choices that we don't think about as being good bad or indifferent. George MacDonald's example is eating breakfast or tea or something very routine and benign. We do not see this as necessarily overtly good thing, but in the end his point is there are many worst things to do!

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