Having crossed the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco not long ago, our temporary travel partner Dmitry has now departed, leaving Jason and I with some more free time for reflection.

This city is absolutely amazing! Too much to explore intimately in the little time we’ve allotted. Gorgeous Muir Woods and Golden Gate Park. Cultural vibrancy in Castro and the old Beat hangouts. But my favorite moment so far has been hanging precariously off the side of cable car at dusk that carried its passengers across the city’s impressive hills with a feeling of rawness and wildness lacking in most forms of modern transport. Well, except perhaps cycling.

Packing up and leaving Philadelphia to take this trip has left me with a lot of unanswered questions about place and home. Jason and I have gotten into a few conversations recently about schemas and mindset - sets of assumptions or expectations we have about the world and how those affect the ways in which we interact with the world, limiting or serving us in various ways. I’ve been thinking a lot about how our environment - literally, the place where we live - affects our schemas. By moving around so often on this trip, hopping place to place before we have a chance to feel settled, everything becomes ephemeral, including our temporary schemas. I found myself to be a slightly different person when in Seattle than when camping under redwoods in northern California. Sometimes, when I like a place very much, I think it might have less to do with the place itself and more to do with how much I like the person I become in that place.

Since San Francisco has been a city I’ve never visited but wanted very much to like, the idea of setting up the proper schema before even arriving was on my mind. I wanted San Francisco me to be gregarious, adventurous, humble, and compassionate. Having been here a few days, I feel that my hopes have been largely overshadowed by the power of the city. That’s not to say that my schema in this city is one I dislike - it’s just one I felt I had little control in creating. San Francisco took the reins and dropped me off wherever it felt appropriate.

Being unsure about exactly where I plan to live upon the trip’s conclusion, I’ve been thinking a lot about what schemas I have formed in cities I know well: Philadelphia, New York, Boston. And what opportunities there may be for me to develop new schemas in new places.

While I’ve come to no conclusions yet, one of the greatest lessons of a bike tour is the infinitude of space. There is so much to see along every road, so much one could learn by pondering the existence and grandeur of a single tree, that perhaps there are always opportunities to open ourselves to new tabula rasa environments in which we are free to rewrite our schemas. We don’t always need a new city to catapult ourselves towards a new approach to life. Maybe we just need a new tree to sit under. Change is always accessible.

My favorite Rilke quote has emphasized relevance today: “Whoever you are some evening take a step out of your house which you know so well. Enormous space is near…”

Posted on September 25th, 2007 by Derrick
Filed under: Uncategorized