Cabbage Hill

Eventually, my memory stirs. It awakens, and shares with me – “Ah, this is where we are. I remember.” As I pass Cabbage Hill Farm, on my left, travelling south along the Swayfield Road.

“Yes, of course.” answers me. “That’s why the landscape is familiar – woods, slopes, road.”

Conversation between memory and me brings forth images and sensations from when I travelled here first, on my old Scott mountain bike. I took to the bike in those days when my legs were too over worked to run. Training for ultra marathons, back in 2011. A recovery day was to cycle 35 miles. I was kind, sort of – choosing only to cycle on road when recovering.

And, instantaneously, I shift from the near term memory of this road that I’ve been using as part of my route when winds are from the north. Cycling into the wind going out, then with the wind coming home – what I consider a cycling lore. I shift to the memories and sensations of then, I shift to then, and I sit up to feel more in then.

I’m cycling now, also. Here, in 2023. Twelve years later, same place, same activity, same me. Different time, yes. Yet, today and then are also closely connected, and they are almost the same. Separated only by my capacity to remember, to recall, to reconnect my dots.

As my memory searches, and reconnects dots of my history, I recall how this stretch of road has felt comfortably familiar for many months. Almost unnoticed by me, the curve of the road, both uphill and downhill. Woods on the east side, a gently sloping hill, almost unkempt entrance to the farm, which I cannot see from the road at any time of the year.

This is Spring, late, with plenty of new growth to keep shelter in place, not revealing anything new to my peering curious eyes. Newness is my experience of this familiar, this travelled, this remembered place.

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In feeling connected to this place, and to the times when I have been here, I now feel connected to my quest, to my grand adventure. I float gently downhill, gliding home, towards Stamford. I float, I lift, within myself.

This is why my exercise is so valuable for me. It uplifts me, away from all the anxiety-inducing discomforts of life. More importantly, it uplifts me from myself, from my fractious and thought-ridden self of awareness. It floats me over and away from my considerations of managing myself, managing my managing of myself. Not managing myself, managing the not managing of myself.

Here, in the saddle, pedaling along. I simply am.

I know this, again, today, as I pass among and breathe deeply from the gently nudging air which flows with light-laden coolness through the woods, around Cabbage Hill and every wood. I am connected to every flow of fresh and freeing air, giving me refreshing of myself with which to renew, with which I can be, in other places, the best that I can be.

With exercise, I have a chance of being a better version of me, and I hold this so tightly that it hurts. Being my best self, such an imposing and perhaps impossible ambition. Yet, here. I am.

Maybe I bring my world here, instead of the other way around. Maybe I bring my world to the places of wind and air and woods and rolling and uplifting. Maybe, by bringing these places into my world, as often as I can, maybe this is how to connect, building escape to where I am rather than from where I am.