Shared reverence
Out of our shells and into our humanity
I started riding a bike for my commute. Please don’t be impressed. It’s a pedal-assist cargo e-bike, so I’m not exerting myself too much. It’s a grocery getter, short-haul carrier bike that might be the most middle-aged purchase I’ve ever made. But the wind in my face, safely navigating around my neighborhood, town, and beyond has been a nice experience. Mostly.
I live where the weather favors biking or what I’ll call “exposed to the weather” travel. As a result, many other forms of transportation and hauling are used. It’s nothing to see electric scooters, skateboards, or pushcarts that sell elote, ice cream, and fruit. There are Latina grandmothers with repurposed baby strollers that hold their groceries. I once saw a guy pushing a shopping cart with materials he used for a remodeling project.
There are lots of people out of the cocoon of a car. They’re walking, single-wheel zooming, and generally making their way to wherever, with whomever is doing the same. As one of them, I’ve noticed a funny thing that happens as I ride along: shared reverence.
As we pass one another, there’s a nod, wave, or smile. It happens in boating on lakes, among Jeep drivers, and in the motorcycle community. The subtext feels like this: Another person is trying to get somewhere just like me. I’ve found myself thinking of these everyday people differently. I’m softer towards them. The shared struggle is out in the open, so a kind of microdose of care seems to go out to them as we travel together.
Moreover, passing vehicles honor our efforts to navigate the world in this exposed way. They often give us the right of way and provide a wide berth as they pass. There are exceptions, moments when a car aggressively accelerates to get around me as if to say, “Get a horse pal!” but in general we all kind of feel gently considered.
Since I landed in this community of exposed travel later in life, I feel this subtle sense of respect for humanity a bit more acutely. I don’t usually see and honor others in my car unless I know them. Conversely, in the insulated kingdom of my car, I find opposition, competition, and a lack of regard for others. There are remarkable exceptions, but I find it interesting that all it takes is one layer of distance between us and others dissolving to make the shared reverence easier to feel.
The insulated travel I do supports an illusion. The illusion that we’re separate. You’re over there, I’m over here, we are not the same. Even further, the brand or age of our car can add to the imagined separation. Don’t get me started on a license plate from another state or heaven forbid a bumper sticker with a hot take. In our moving boundaries we slowly become less willing to acknowledge we’re “in this together” and instead can invest in “othering” people. This is further supported when we tap a button inside our cars, drive into our garages, enter our homes. There is a screen that delivers a pale substitute for human interaction for the evening. Maybe we live lives of quiet designed desperation.
I don’t have a fix for this, suggesting one is so profoundly out of touch with the massive current of progress and modernity. I merely want to encourage myself to be aware of all the insulating layers that keep me one step removed from the people of the world around me. These are sometimes unavoidable, so the move may be to be intentional about peeling back the layers when the opportunity presents itself.
Even as the more wealthy and advanced among us find chartered flights and security fences to be a god-like insulating move, I can do well to remember often that the real God came to live among us and to save the worst of us. So identified was he with those he traveled with that it took a kiss to single him out from among them.
Be well friends.