Handlebars

Handlebars—not the normal image that comes to mind when sitting at a desk, unless the walls surrounding this desk enshrine a life, a career, a past to contemplate as one contemplates a recipe for supper or eyeing a book on the shelf you read long ago and eyeing it again caused you to open it. The recipe begs a grocery list, so you go to the grocery store and move down one aisle, then another looking for honey mustard or a salty prosciutto to go with a good, crusted artisan loaf, all triggering some sensory perception to be revisited when you return home to cook. The recipe and the book take you somewhere. Each travels your mind to favored times through faded Kodachrome and dusty trinkets kept just for the stories, the people behind them, the good feelings called to mind and presence.

Secreted in this room are boxes, tucked away because you thought putting stuff in a box makes you think you are organized. But the boxes just fill cabinet space otherwise empty, void, and useless. Why have the cabinet if stuff-filled boxes and memories cannot be squirreled away there? Why have walls without pictures and shelves without trinkets? The why, of course, is handlebars.

But why handlebars? Handlebars are something you hold onto, something that steadies you, balances you against the fall. They steer and turn either right or left. Handlebars hold onto our past. Holding on, you might as well drink a glass of sweet tea on a screened porch with the ceiling fans turning fast enough to cool the sweat from your brow. You’ll look forward to going home to sit on that porch where worldly pressures do not enter because they are “out there somewhere” away from you. Porches are restorative and satisfying.

There is something we know about that porch—remembered late-night discussions audibly above cricket chirps, making homemade peach ice cream, enjoying second helpings, then, discovering a truth we did not know, yet—we can’t stay there forever. The bowl empties. The ice cream melts. The sun fades into night, rises tomorrow, takes us from yesterday’s familiarity into today’s unknown, sometimes with a sense of dread, sometimes with excitement and hope. A grieving ghost drifting between synaptic spaces, the past is nothing to hold onto. A favored past may be safe to visit, like a cemetery, but it’s gone forever.

Handlebars are suited for the past but not much good for tomorrow. No one knows tomorrow. How can you hold onto what you don’t know? But it doesn’t keep you from trying to stretch the good memories into tomorrow.

Besides, to dream our past, to look back, to never take time in the present being present and give our full duty to the moment is an anti-faith way of living. May you think it good to reminisce, then think it better to give to the day what God has wrought new in you. The giving is a letting go of what was meant for another.

Shouldn’t we let go of the handlebars and trust God?