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| Olympic Mountains Photo by: Me |
A lot of the things we do are dumb. That is, when we take
the time to examine them and the reason for doing them, we find that it’s hard
to explain why they are worth doing without making certain assumptions about what is good and valuable
in the world. Why do we draw or write or sing songs or ride bikes or exercise?
Because we want to? But why do we want to? Depending on your world view, you’ll
eventually get down to, “Because I’m a random collection of chemical reactions and apparently these chemicals do those things.”
This feels dumb to me. A random collection of chemical reactions shouldn’t want
to do anything. But we do. Dumbly, I guess.
Take Thursday for example. I took the day off work to ride
my bicycle in the woods. Some of you may have immediately thought, “Well, that’s
a dumb way to spend a day.” And you’d be right, if we’re using the definition
above. It is difficult to explain why I did that and why I thought that it was
a good use of time. But let’s try. Let us, you and I, examine a dumb thing with
the hopes that the examination might help us understand ourselves a little better.
The ride started on Kitsap Way at about 8:30 in the morning.
It’s a four-lane road that serves as a funnel for people getting off the highway
and heading towards downtown. It is neither scenic nor quiet. It is a stretch
of road that one rides on to get somewhere else. But it has a shoulder
re-painted as a bike lane, so it’s not as scary as it could be given the
traffic.
Kitsap Way slips under the highway overpass and immediately
starts chugging up a hill. Because the hill is on the side of the highway opposite
most of the places people are heading to that time of day, the traffic on my
side of the road immediately dropped in volume. I enjoyed the quieter road and
the way pushing up the hill was warming my muscles in the chilly morning.
And here we can stop and make our first defense of the bike
ride. I was exercising. Using my muscles to make them stronger. Which is good,
right? But why is being stronger good? So I can ride bikes more? That’s
weirdly circular. What else? So I can be healthy and live longer? But why
should a collection of chemicals want to live longer, and what is health to a
collection of chemicals anyway?
We ride on.
I took a left at the Y just past Big Apple Diner (try the
dinner chips if you haven’t, they’re fantastic). This put me on Northlake Way
NW which is a delightful stretch of road for two reasons. One, it has a smooth
and wide shoulder when you're heading west. Two, it is slightly downhill but doesn’t look to be
downhill. This slight negative gradient has the effect of making you ride much
faster with less effort. The logical part of my mind is aware of this
phenomenon. It knows that I’m on a hill and not to get excited. The emotional
part of me notes the speed and the relative lack of effort and decides that I
have become incredibly strong incredibly quickly. I am, in that moment, all
that is man. I plan what professional bike racing team I will ride for. It’s a wonderful feeling while it lasts.
Another left on another Y leads me to Seabeck Highway NW
where I eventually take a left onto Holly Road and then onto Seabeck Holly Road
NW. These roads are wooded and mostly quiet in the middle of the day. I take
the opportunity to listen to The End of Eternity, a novel by Isaac
Asimov as I ride.* It’s about time travel and the nature of reality and it
provides some insight into 1950s America. There is always something of the
author, something of the time and place, that bleeds into the words even in science
fiction pieces.**
Maybe this was why I wanted to go for a ride. Listening to a
book for hours without interruption or the feeling that I should
be doing chores is a rare gift for people with jobs and kids and dogs and an old house. But why would I want to listen to
fiction? What about entering a world that doesn’t exist should be appealing to
this unwieldy sack of chemicals? Isn’t this another dumbness?
I eventually turn left off of Seabeck Holly Road NW and onto
Dewatto Road W, but first there is the hill. It is… glorious. You see, most of Seabeck
Holly Road NW blends in my mind as an endless string of trees and small,
rolling hills. Pleasant, but not particularly memorable. But that hill, that
fast and smooth and gently left-turning downhill is beautiful.
It is flying on two wheels. It is the feeling of being launched like a missile.
It is becoming the wind and roaring with it. It is eye-watering exhilaration.
My friends, it’s fun. But, also dumb.
Why does fun matter? What good is fun? Is it productive?
Does it help my chemical make more chemicals in order to maintain a world where
chemicals like mine are around for a long time? Perhaps this, too, is dumb.
The downside of that glorious hill is that one needs to
climb up another hill on the other side. This particular hill looks a lot like
my front tire. That isn’t accurate. What I saw was my front tire and the area
of road a few feet in front of it. Looking up farther than that was too hard.
The steepness of the road called for my entire attention, and frivolous things
like looking around the landscape were ignored for the time being.
When I topped out the hill and regained my field of vision,
I was provided a view of the Olympic Mountains standing regally over the wooded
hills just past the Hood Canal. The mountains punch above their weight, aesthetically.
They are not, in the world of mountains, particularly tall. But they are rugged
and snow capped and evoke a sense of quiet awe. Do you want to know what I thought
when I saw them with my heart still racing and my lungs still burning from the
climb? I will tell you. I thought, “Oooh. Pretty.” Truly, bicycles make poets
of us all.
But this, too, we must call dumb. What does beauty matter in
the world? Why bother with it? Why should my heart soar when I see white-capped
mountains beneath robins-egg-blue skies? What difference does the golden dance
of the sun make as it pours around the evening clouds? None. Another dumb thing
on our list of dumb things seen while I did a dumb thing.
I could go on with the ride, with my climb up the gravel
roads by Horse Camp beneath Green Mountain or whizzing around Wild Cat Lake,
but I think I have enough dumb things stacked up to make my point. I have been
giving a hard time to the philosophy of materialism, that philosophy that says
that the only things that exist are material things and that we’re all the
result of random chance. And I have been contrasting that philosophy with things
that I feel are valuable like exercise and beauty and art. And I have been
forced to call these valuable things dumb when viewed through the eyes of
materialism.
But I have a confession. I do not believe these things are dumb. I believe they are valuable. I believe that they point us to something more real than our atoms. I believe they point us to God, and that we long for them because we are more than our atoms. That we have souls, and those souls are not atoms or the hallucination of chemicals walking around in skin sacks.
I find that materialism, when actually looked at, when
struggled with, when held up to real life, results in a sort of nihilism that is, ironically, soul crushing. When viewed through the eyes of a Christian, all these “dumb”
things become meaningful. Exercise becomes a tool to take care of the body we’re
given and honor the One who gave it. Art becomes a way to see the spirit of a
time more than the facts of a time. Beauty becomes a way for our hearts to bend
back to the creator of beauty, to God.
Allow me to recap: I went on a bike ride on Thursday, and it brought me a
little bit closer to God. And that, my friends, is not dumb at all.
Love,
Me
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| A "dumb" road Photo by: Me |
*Mandatory safety note: I use an earbud in my right ear. It
lets me hear the road and the book at the same time.
**I haven’t finished the book yet, so this isn’t a
recommendation. But so far it’s good.
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