The bullets come flying, but at this point in the film, you know they’re not going to kill the chosen one, Neo, Keanu Reeves in a leather trench coat. Instead, the bullets slow seeming to hang in air, and Neo looks at them curiously, now fully the master of his powers, fully in control of the situation, the savior of humanity.
Here is some backstory.
A friend of mine started riding mountain bikes in her 40s. We had a long history of running and skiing together, and she wanted my help with mountain biking, because it’s an interesting mid-point between running and skiing, and also because it’s awesome. So, for the last couple seasons we’ve ridden once or twice a week together, and I’ve gotten to watch her go from extremely slow, tentative and fearful, to much more confident, capable and now inching her way into technical skills in a more serious way.
When we started out, the going was slow, and I had to change the way I rode, to shift my mindset from charging through obstacles, speed always being a substitute for skill, to approaching them slowly, breaking down the movements and working on smoothness. This turned out to be really good for my riding as well as hers. After 30 years on a mountain bike, a lot of what you do becomes unconscious and converting that back to conscious and communicating it has been super fun for me.
When you’re learning a magic trick (like dodging bullets), you first perform it slowly, so that you understand every nuance of the movement, and then you practice until you can do it at a speed that it becomes a real trick. Perhaps counterintuitively, bike skills can also work this way.
So we session.
Maybe she is struggling with an obstacle. I give her some advice. The advice sounds like, “Just dodge the bullets.” She tries again. She tries again. She tries again. Her mind, the part that can make sense of “just dodge the bullets,” slowly comes together with her body, which must do the dodging. Through repetition everything is slowing down, sifting out into its constituent parts. Compress the front of the bike. Pull back with arms. Push forward with feet. Contact the apex of the rock. Shift body weight forward. Unweight the rear of the bike. Extend arms. Punch through, up, and over.
At some point, I have found, abstracting an obstacle from its trail is as much fun as riding it in context. I’ve been riding mountain bikes for 30 years or so, and I see now that too much of that riding has been linear, aimed at getting from one end of the trail to the other. If I didn’t clean an obstacle on the first try, well, better luck next time.
Now, even with obstacles I have on lock, sessioning has taught me new ways to ride them, or new ways to flow through them. Some of obstacles stick in my head, and I daydream about them. How to solve the puzzle next time? I pick them apart, offline. I go back to the trail and discover that my solution works. I wonder, to myself, how I would look in a leather trench coat.