The Lunch Can Wait. Look at That Sunshine.

There is a point during my lunch break when the motorcycle outside becomes considerably more interesting than the food in front of me.

I am at the stables. I have been working. I sit down at the table, and through the glass doors I can see her parked there.... 

Then the sun comes out.

It is October. I know perfectly well that sunshine is no longer something I can take for granted.

A little more light falls across the bike.

I look at my lunch.

I look outside.

That is usually the end of lunch.

I leave the food, go for my helmet, get dressed and head out. The decision seems to happen somewhere before I have finished discussing it with myself.

How do I explain that pull?

Looking at her, I can already feel the pleasure of being on the road.

I know how completely I will become involved in what I am doing. And suddenly, sitting there watching the sunshine feels almost impossible.

Once I am riding, my attention has somewhere it wants to be.

My hands, my body, the motorcycle, the road ahead. There is a conversation happening through movement, through the way the bike responds and the adjustments I make.

I feel present in a very physical way.

There is so much to notice that my thoughts stop reaching in twenty different directions. I am interested in this movement, this stretch of road, what I am feeling and what comes next.

And it feels beautiful.

I can be concentrating fully and enjoying myself enormously at the same time.

The pleasure is in being involved, in feeling myself learn, in recognising a response that is becoming more familiar.

Then, somehow, it is time to stop.

People sometimes joke that they would practically have to shoot me to get me off the motorcycle.

I understand what they mean.

I get off, look at her and immediately want to be back on.

That is why the question of the “best route” makes me smile.

Someone offers me a way to arrive twenty minutes earlier, and I find myself wondering why I would want to give those minutes away.

I have places to be. Responsibilities. Work that matters to me.

But I love having something in my life that makes me this eager. Something that can still interrupt an ordinary day with such a wholehearted desire to go and do it.

For those hours, I am enjoying the very thing I would otherwise be waiting to finish.

And tomorrow, if I sit down to lunch and the sun falls across the motorcycle again, I already know how this story ends.

The food will be there when I get back.

October sunshine makes fewer promises.

Silvia