Floating Zero

Where even is the bottom? I have looked. I have rooted around deep in the bucket of myself and never quite gotten there. Oh sure, I’ve emptied the bucket, bonked, dehydrated, heartrate capering about untethered, vision dark at the edges, but I have never collapsed. I have never been just bucket.

I have also unplugged myself entirely and stepped away, a hard reboot when the body kept throwing up the blue screen of death. OK. OK. I get it. Pull the power cord. Count to 10 in Mississippis, see if we can’t stabilize the system.

I was riding a few weeks back with my friend Lee. He mentioned that his wife was coming back from Achilles surgery. It’s her third. She was finding that even the most rudimentary fitness had deserted her. In fact, each time she’d gone under the knife, she’d come back to find that zero had moved. Each time the beginning was farther back than before, the bucket deeper, Mississippi seeming to add syllables capriciously, William Faulkner with a horrible stutter.

One of the failings of the human mind is the way it clings to linearity as a way to understand the world. We expect things to progress or degrade along a predictable curve. We don’t expect the bottom to drop out. We believe zero ought to be where we left it.

But zero floats. It could be anywhere.

I found it down a trail I know well, perched just beyond a log I’d jumped a hundred times before. I found it on a small, badly placed rock, at the entrance to the place I ride every Friday. I found it in my right ankle. I found it between my ears. I have even discovered it, quite unexpectedly, in my own broken heart.

So we start over.

Oh, but you know there are other zeros with less sad stories. Like that moment I went from not believing I could balance on two wheels to believing I could. The big leaps, the ones that imprint in your mind, all seem to be from zero.

When you’re there, you might feel sad, frustrated, hopeless, but it’s all in front of you. There’s no where else to go.