When you get to a certain age, you become more honest with yourself because, really, you have no other choice. I think that it was the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset who said that at age 45, a person can no longer live in fictions.
One thing I've finally admitted to myself is that when I talk about what I "should" or "am supposed to" do, I'm actually just forestalling, even if only for a second, doing what I actually want to do.
And so it is that on days like today, I can tell you there were things I "should have" done--which, of course, I didn't do. At least I managed, pretty early, to admit to myself that I wasn't going to do them.
It just took one look out my window--which was wide open (save for the screen, of course). The morning was delightfully cool in a way it hasn't been in a long time. Breezes were light and skies blue, full of sunshine.
Well, it wasn't just any old mild, sunny day--with low humidity, to boot. The qualities of that day seemed all the more vivid because it followed a long heat wave. Something else made it truly unusual, though.
You see, the morning felt like early autumn and the early afternoon felt like one of those late-summer days we experience a week or so after Labor Day. That made for delightful cycling weather. The relatively cool air, however, was accompanied by the sort of refulgent summer light one sees in Impressionist paintings of picnics or other outings in the country. Even the concrete canyons and brick-lined boulevards seemed to be bathed in the deep greens of the rippling leaves and the deep yellow sunlight.
I took a ride to--where else--Connecticut--where even the War Memorial in Greenwich seemed to camouflage itself in that light.
And the bike I rode--Arielle, my Mercian Audax. (Sorry about the poor quality of my cell-phone photos!)
