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add holding space

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Kathleen Fitzpatrick
2025-01-31 15:13:09 -05:00
parent 744bf2dfc4
commit 582472fc0f
1942 changed files with 2693 additions and 1901 deletions
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@@ -5,11 +5,19 @@
<subtitle>The long-running and erratically updated blog of Kathleen Fitzpatrick.</subtitle>
<link href="https://kfitz.info/feed/feed.xml" rel="self" />
<link href="https://kfitz.info/" />
<updated>2024-12-22T15:54:17Z</updated>
<updated>2025-01-31T20:00:18Z</updated>
<id>https://kfitz.info/</id>
<author>
<name>Kathleen Fitzpatrick</name>
</author>
<entry>
<title>Holding Space</title>
<link href="https://kfitz.info/holding-space/" />
<updated>2025-01-31T20:00:18Z</updated>
<id>https://kfitz.info/holding-space/</id>
<content type="html">&lt;p&gt;Here I was, super happy with my return to blogging in 2024. I wasn&#39;t crazy prolific or anything, but I did manage to post &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; every month except for April. What happened in April? &lt;a href=&quot;https://kfitz.info/things-that-happened/&quot;&gt;Kind of a lot.&lt;/a&gt; But nothing compared with January. Someday I hope to have the time and space necessary to write about at least part of it, but that day is not today. Today, all I can do is close out January by trying to hold a bit of space toward a better moment. May that better moment come soon, for all of us.&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Finite</title>
<link href="https://kfitz.info/finite/" />
@@ -134,24 +142,6 @@
&lt;p&gt;I have all kinds of physical evidence of the passage of time, in my creaky knees, my worsening eyesight, my ever-slowing metabolism, but there&#39;s something in me that just doesn&#39;t want to believe that it&#39;s all a one-way trip, that I can&#39;t recover parts of who I was or some of the paths I didn&#39;t take.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Don&#39;t get me wrong: even if I could go back, I wouldn&#39;t -- I have enjoyed my life and my work more and more as time has gone on, and I&#39;m happier than I&#39;ve ever been. And that retirement thing -- not too many years into the future -- looks pretty sweet.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;It&#39;s just funny how even after all these years, I can still get tripped up by the sadness of time, the stuff that gets left behind, the things that never quite manifest. Time may only move in one direction, but I still find myself needing to learn the same things over and over again.&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Like Riding a Bike</title>
<link href="https://kfitz.info/like-riding-a-bike/" />
<updated>2024-08-03T21:45:58Z</updated>
<id>https://kfitz.info/like-riding-a-bike/</id>
<content type="html">&lt;p&gt;The cliché, it turns out, is &lt;em&gt;mostly&lt;/em&gt; true. But only mostly.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Since I moved to East Lansing -- seriously, for seven years now -- I have had the itch to get a bicycle. Nothing fancy, nothing fast, just a commuter bike that I can tool around town on and maybe hit a well-paved trail or two with.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;But I haven&#39;t scratched that itch, largely because I wasn&#39;t sure it was real. I mean, it&#39;s been at least *&lt;em&gt;coughcoughcough&lt;/em&gt;* years since I&#39;ve been on a non-stationary bike. (The number you missed is big enough that even I&#39;m shocked by it.) So I wasn&#39;t entirely convinced that if I had a bicycle I&#39;d really ride it. And as that number of years got larger and larger (not to mention the number of years old I am, which just seems to keep increasing) I got more and more convinced that riding a bike again was out of the question.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I had a series of bikes as a kid, as you do, and loved to ride. In high school my bus stop was about a mile from my house, so I rode my bike there most mornings and left the bike locked to a pole, and then rode it home again. One day, though, when I was maybe 14, I hit a patch of wet gravel on my ride home and lost control of the bike. I slid one way and then overcompensated the other, and wound up with a pretty nice road rash. That healed quickly, but the fear produced by that fall didn&#39;t. I got my driver&#39;s license soon after that (this was Louisiana in the &#39;80s, a time and place where I am horrified to remember that we let kids get full-on licenses at 15) and got a crappy car and just put the bike away.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Some years later -- I think I was in my masters program -- I wanted to ride again, and so I bought a pretty cool bike and rode back and forth to campus a bit, and around the campus lakes a bit. It was nice, but not as great as I wanted it to be. I think I hadn&#39;t really shaken the fear. In any case, after my masters I moved to a series of non-bikeable places, and that was that.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;So when I moved here and discovered how many of my colleagues cycle -- some quite seriously, others for basic getting-around-town -- I started thinking about it again. Thinking about how fun it would be to have a bike to run errands and ride the river trail on. But I did nothing.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Until today. One of the people I follow on Mastodon (hello, &lt;a href=&quot;https://alaskan.social/@seachanger&quot;&gt;malena&lt;/a&gt;!) has been posting a bit lately about the feeling of freedom that riding can generate, and it&#39;s had me looking around online to see if there was something that would call to me. And today it did.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Before I could let myself overthink it, I drove out to the bike shop that had the model I&#39;d fallen in love with, got into a great conversation with the guy who worked there, and took the bicycle out for a test ride in the parking lot. Getting started was a little awkward, but once I was going... it was exactly right. It felt great.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;So I bought it -- spending WAY more than I wanted to, but boy do I love this thing -- and brought it home, and went out for a several-times-around-the-block ride to start the process of relearning how to ride.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;That cliché, again, is mostly true. Parts of riding feel absolutely natural. But there are several things that I&#39;m going to have to work on. My balance is not what it was, and feeling a little wobbly, especially when I&#39;m going slowly, produces a flicker of that old fear. So I need to work on balance, both for confidence and to get to the point where I can comfortably lift a hand off the handlebars to signal turns, which I&#39;ll definitely need to be able to do before I can venture any further.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I so look forward to venturing further.&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
</entry>
</feed>