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  <title>kfitz</title>
  <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>
  <id>https://kfitz.info/</id>
  <author>
    <name>Kathleen Fitzpatrick</name>
  </author>
  <entry>
    <title>Finite</title>
    <link href="https://kfitz.info/finite/" />
    <updated>2024-12-22T15:54:17Z</updated>
    <id>https://kfitz.info/finite/</id>
    <content type="html">&lt;blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;You have to accept that there will always be too much to do; that you can’t avoid tough choices or make the world run at your preferred speed; that no experience, least of all close relationships with other human beings, can ever be guaranteed in advance to turn out painlessly and well—and that from a cosmic viewpoint, when it’s all over, it won’t have counted for very much anyway.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;And in exchange for accepting all that? You get to actually &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; here. You get to have some real purchase on life. You get to spend your finite time focused on a few things that matter to you, in themselves, right now, in this moment.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;— Oliver Burkeman, &lt;em&gt;Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;
</content>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>Rest</title>
    <link href="https://kfitz.info/rest/" />
    <updated>2024-12-21T15:00:16Z</updated>
    <id>https://kfitz.info/rest/</id>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m back to my all-too-slow reading of Oliver Burkeman&#39;s &lt;em&gt;Four Thousand Weeks&lt;/em&gt;, and am finding myself a bit haunted this morning by this passage:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Rest is permissible, but only for the purposes of recuperation for work, or perhaps for some other form of self-improvement. It becomes difficult to enjoy a moment of rest for itself alone, without regard for any potential future benefits, because rest that has no instrumental value feels wasteful.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Haunted, because I &lt;em&gt;at least in theory&lt;/em&gt; started a vacation yesterday -- or, rather, two days of vacation followed by my university&#39;s relatively new December 24 to January 1 closure. But I&#39;m having a super hard time actually turning work off. Partly because the needs of my colleagues have not stopped just because I&#39;ve taken a couple of days off. Partly because I cannot get myself to stop reflexively checking all of the various messaging systems through which they ask me for stuff.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;That&#39;s on me, not them. I&#39;m thinking a lot this morning about what it would take for me to genuinely shut everything down and walk away from it all, even for a couple of days. It&#39;s tough to imagine.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, Burkeman goes on from this passage to talk about the &amp;quot;pathological productivity&amp;quot; inspired in no small part by the collision of Calvinism and capitalism, and the ways that one&#39;s &amp;quot;tendency toward virtuous striving and thriftiness&amp;quot; were -- ahem, &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; -- imagined to be a sign of one&#39;s state of salvation. Which rang all kinds of bells for me, and made me go in search of &lt;a href=&quot;https://kfitz.info/rest/outward-and-visible-signs/&quot;&gt;this blog post from 2012&lt;/a&gt;, which reminded me how little I&#39;ve learned in the last twelve years, or rather how much I&#39;ve had to learn again and again and again.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Rest for its own sake. Rest for purposes that are non- -- or even anti- -- instrumentalist. All of this requires the ability to understand the value of the human in the world as about &lt;em&gt;being&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;doing&lt;/em&gt;. And this is hard, hard, hard.&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>Preservation and Care</title>
    <link href="https://kfitz.info/preservation-care/" />
    <updated>2024-12-20T19:04:19Z</updated>
    <id>https://kfitz.info/preservation-care/</id>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m finally getting a chance to do some sustained reading, now that my winter break has begun, and so managed at last to dive into &lt;a href=&quot;https://lil.law.harvard.edu/century-scale-storage/&quot;&gt;Maxwell Neely-Cohen&#39;s &amp;quot;Century-Scale Storage&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. It&#39;s good to see foregrounded the idea that preservation is not a matter of technological development (quite the contrary) but of human care buttressed by financial investment. I found myself particularly struck by this:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The advantage of print is that it can be a practice. What was printed before can be reprinted. The downside is that, in order to take advantage of the full preservational powers of the codex form, what you are saving and printing has to be valued by the public.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;In the digital realm, of course, we&#39;ve long heard that Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe -- and it&#39;s true -- but we still have to care enough to make those copies, and to ensure that they&#39;re properly stored and checked and migrated as needed. Perhaps the public might be enlisted in preservation efforts by being &lt;em&gt;encouraged&lt;/em&gt; to make copies of cultural objects they value rather than by being &lt;em&gt;punished&lt;/em&gt; for doing so. As Neely-Cohen notes, &amp;quot;The most enduring decentralized [preservation] efforts don’t owe their success to technological or organizational innovation, but rather by having enlisted generations of people with an emotional and intellectual investment in their worth.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The scale of the digital preservation problem is going to require massive investment, and the political will necessary to generate it -- a requirement easily generative of despair here at the end of 2024. But here we are, with stuff we care about and want to keep safe.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;[I]f you, an individual reading this, want to store something and ensure it survives a century, what should you do? More than one thing. You should combine every method available to you, layers of backups, armies of copies, and most of all, practices and sites that encourage a culture of watchfulness and care. You should fight for a society that values the sciences and arts and that which they produce. And then, each day, you should do whatever it takes to keep your something safe, do whatever you can to empower the next generation to do the same, and then entrust that battle to them, to repeat into futurity.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;
</content>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>On Distraction</title>
    <link href="https://kfitz.info/on-distraction/" />
    <updated>2024-12-14T22:27:34Z</updated>
    <id>https://kfitz.info/on-distraction/</id>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;For a host of reasons, I had to put Oliver Burkeman&#39;s &lt;em&gt;Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals&lt;/em&gt; down for a couple of weeks; there was the post-Thanksgiving crush at work, and then travel for a family event, and then travel for a conference, and then a &lt;a href=&quot;https://about.hcommons.org/2024/12/10/kcworks-named-designated-public-access-repository-of-the-national-endowment-for-the-humanities/&quot;&gt;big announcement&lt;/a&gt; about a big project, and then, and then, and then. But I picked it back up this afternoon, and just tripped on this passage and fell flat on my face:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Most other resources on which we rely as individuals—such as food, money, and electricity—are things that facilitate life, and in some cases it’s possible to live without them, at least for a while. Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life. Seen this way, “distraction” needn’t refer only to momentary lapses in focus, as when you’re distracted from performing your work duties by the ping of an incoming text message, or a compellingly terrible news story. The job itself could be a distraction—that is, an investment of a portion of your attention, and therefore of your life, in something less meaningful than other options that might have been available to you.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I will only say here that I have spent the better part of the last few months deep in a fret about what I want to be when I grow up, and this hits right at the heart of it. There&#39;s the thing I&#39;m trying so hard to build, and there&#39;s the thing that brings tangible rewards. There&#39;s the thing that I&#39;m most passionate about, and there&#39;s the thing that supports my community. There&#39;s the thing that could with a lot of effort and a bit of luck turn out to be a huge success, and there&#39;s the thing that serves as its own indicator of success.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Burkeman is forcing me to realize that no small part of the strain I&#39;ve been feeling of late is resulting from my trying to have it both ways, trying to keep all my options open, trying to avoid having a path not taken. But each option demands my attention in a way that can only prove a distraction from the others, and the others do not let up in their demands in the meantime.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;So the challenge ahead in the new year is, I think, to figure out where I want to place my focus, what might be most meaningful for my life -- and then to find ways to make peace with the distractions, whether by compartmentalizing them or by letting them go entirely. It&#39;s not easy: many of those distractions have real appeal. But if they&#39;re not the thing I most want to do, that appeal might well have the same effect on me as an evening spent doom-scrolling. Rebuilding my attention span in this sense might be more a matter of reckoning with my real priorities than retraining my brain to do one thing at a time.&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>Start by Admitting Defeat</title>
    <link href="https://kfitz.info/admitting-defeat/" />
    <updated>2024-11-30T21:44:40Z</updated>
    <id>https://kfitz.info/admitting-defeat/</id>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;From Oliver Burkeman&#39;s &lt;em&gt;Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals&lt;/em&gt;, which I am reading for reasons:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved &amp;quot;work-life balance,&amp;quot; whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the &amp;quot;six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.&amp;quot; The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;But you know what? That&#39;s &lt;em&gt;excellent&lt;/em&gt; news. (16)&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;
</content>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>In Pursuit of the POSSE Pipedream</title>
    <link href="https://kfitz.info/posse-pipedream/" />
    <updated>2024-11-29T19:55:21Z</updated>
    <id>https://kfitz.info/posse-pipedream/</id>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;Some months back, I set up the ability to push new blog posts (or at least summaries thereof) to &lt;a href=&quot;https://hcommons.social/@kfitz&quot;&gt;my hcommons.social account&lt;/a&gt;, using a service called &lt;a href=&quot;https://mastofeed.org&quot;&gt;Mastofeed&lt;/a&gt;. Now that I find myself using &lt;a href=&quot;https://bsky.app/profile/kfitz.info&quot;&gt;Bluesky&lt;/a&gt; at least a bit, I wanted to think about how it might fit into my workflows.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m a big fan of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://indieweb.org/POSSE&quot;&gt;IndieWeb POSSE&lt;/a&gt; mode of publishing here at &lt;a href=&quot;http://kfitz.info&quot;&gt;kfitz.info&lt;/a&gt; (thereby owning my content) and syndicating that content elsewhere. Mastofeed helped me do that, but it&#39;s of course Mastodon-specific. After a little searching around I ran across &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.raymondcamden.com/2024/11/05/automatically-posting-to-bluesky-on-new-rss-items&quot;&gt;this blog post by Raymond Camden&lt;/a&gt;, detailing how he used &lt;a href=&quot;https://pipedream.com&quot;&gt;Pipedream&lt;/a&gt; to push new blog posts to Bluesky. The post includes a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.raymondcamden.com/2022/12/06/automatically-posting-to-mastodon-and-twitter-on-new-rss-items&quot;&gt;his prior use of Pipedream to do the same for Mastodon and Twitter&lt;/a&gt;, so I decided to see if I could build a single workflow that (1) listens to &lt;a href=&quot;https://kfitz.info/feed/feed.xml&quot;&gt;my RSS feed&lt;/a&gt; for new posts, (2) extracts the key stuff (in this case, the post title and link) from it, and (3) passes it to both Mastodon and Bluesky.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Pipedream is nowhere near as no-/low-code as the long-lamented Yahoo Pipes, but it&#39;s pretty amazing nonetheless, and provides great &lt;a href=&quot;https://pipedream.com/docs&quot;&gt;documentation&lt;/a&gt; for the many, many things you can build with it. There was a pre-built step for Mastodon posting, so that was easy peasy, but Bluesky required a bit of coding to connect with its API (which is also &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.bsky.app/docs/get-started&quot;&gt;pretty well documented&lt;/a&gt;). After a few &lt;a href=&quot;https://bsky.app/profile/kfitz.info/post/3lc4crk4laj25&quot;&gt;minorly amusing missteps&lt;/a&gt;, I&#39;ve now got a workflow up and running that should allow me to publish this post and have notifications about it go out to both hcommons.social and Bluesky within a few minutes.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Now to go about the having-thoughts-worth-sharing part of the endeavor.&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>Rebuilding</title>
    <link href="https://kfitz.info/rebuilding/" />
    <updated>2024-11-29T16:35:27Z</updated>
    <id>https://kfitz.info/rebuilding/</id>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;At some point a month or so ago (probably more &amp;quot;or so&amp;quot; given my recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://kfitz.info/time-is-weird&quot;&gt;what is time even&lt;/a&gt; challenges), I upgraded the innards of this site from Eleventy 2.0 to Eleventy 3.0. This turned out to require a moderate amount of tinkering in order to get things shifted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.11ty.dev/docs/cjs-esm/&quot;&gt;the older version&#39;s use of CommonJS to the newer one&#39;s use of ESM&lt;/a&gt;. I managed to get it about 95% sorted fairly quickly, however. The one real holdout was my webmentions functionality, which I was having a hard time getting to work in the new iteration.&lt;sup class=&quot;footnote-ref&quot;&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://kfitz.info/rebuilding/#fn1&quot; id=&quot;fnref1&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; As my current gig does not afford me a lot of tinkering time, I had to put that aside, figuring that the site was at least doing the basics, and that would do for now.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I turned back to trying to fix webmentions yesterday, and finally managed to get the data retrieved and cached and munged and filtered in all the ways, such that it landed on the right pages. But it looked &lt;em&gt;terrible&lt;/em&gt;. And so there were many more hours of frustration while I tried to figure out why the new &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.11ty.dev/docs/plugins/image/&quot;&gt;eleventy-image&lt;/a&gt; and its fancy transform were causing such trouble in the rendering of webmention avatars.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Except they weren&#39;t. It turned out that it was a basic CSS problem -- as in the css file that styles webmentions was somehow not getting included in the build process. And now it is.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;So: a post to celebrate a successful rebuild! And perhaps even to inspire a bit more writing in the weeks ahead.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;hr class=&quot;footnotes-sep&quot;&gt;
&lt;section class=&quot;footnotes&quot;&gt;
&lt;ol class=&quot;footnotes-list&quot;&gt;
&lt;li id=&quot;fn1&quot; class=&quot;footnote-item&quot;&gt;&lt;p&gt;Actually, there&#39;s one more thing: a footnote rendering issue. So that&#39;s next up for this afternoon&#39;s exploration.&lt;sup class=&quot;footnote-ref&quot;&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://kfitz.info/rebuilding/#fn2&quot; id=&quot;fnref2&quot;&gt;[2]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://kfitz.info/rebuilding/#fnref1&quot; class=&quot;footnote-backref&quot;&gt;↩︎&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li id=&quot;fn2&quot; class=&quot;footnote-item&quot;&gt;&lt;p&gt;And I think that&#39;s now fixed as well. &lt;a href=&quot;https://kfitz.info/rebuilding/#fnref2&quot; class=&quot;footnote-backref&quot;&gt;↩︎&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ol&gt;
&lt;/section&gt;
</content>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>Passivity vs. Accountability</title>
    <link href="https://kfitz.info/passivity/" />
    <updated>2024-10-01T12:01:31Z</updated>
    <id>https://kfitz.info/passivity/</id>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;I have a book coming out this month (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12787/leading-generously&quot;&gt;preorder here&lt;/a&gt;) exploring the tools through which people caught in the middle of bureaucratic systems can work together to transform their institutions. These tools can also be used by folks in leadership positions to ensure that they’re using the reach that their perch on the org chart provides in order to do good.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I am realizing this morning, however (for reasons), that though I talk a lot about communication, about honesty, about vulnerability, and about trust, one thing I never flat out say in the book is AVOID THE PASSIVE VOICE, especially in messages in which you are having to reckon with something bad. This is not just a principle of good writing: it’s a demonstration of willingness to take responsibility for the power that you hold.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;You are, inevitably, going to make decisions that turn out to be bad ones. When you do, you have to own your role in those decisions and be accountable for the harm those decisions cause. Mistakes do not just get magically made without a mistake-maker.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;And even when you feel -- perhaps correctly -- that the decision you made was the only one that could be made, that circumstances left you with only one option, you still need to own it. You might be able to explain, but you have to be cautious with explanations, to avoid making it appear as though you are deflecting your own responsibility. As painful as it is to be publicly accountable, you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; take that accountability to your community seriously. Hand-wavy gestures that shift blame are visible to everyone, and are a significant factor in destroying trust.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;You cannot lead in the passive voice. You cannot build good relationships in the passive voice. And you cannot undo damage in the passive voice. You can only deepen it.&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>Time Is Weird</title>
    <link href="https://kfitz.info/time-is-weird/" />
    <updated>2024-09-08T22:21:58Z</updated>
    <id>https://kfitz.info/time-is-weird/</id>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;There&#39;s this moment that happened a lot of years ago: I was walking through the living room of the apartment I was living in and the television was on playing god knows what, and something made me think, &lt;em&gt;you know, the next time I&#39;m 25 --&lt;/em&gt;, followed quickly by &lt;em&gt;you big dope, that&#39;s not going to happen...&lt;/em&gt;, at which point I stopped dead and thought &lt;em&gt;you do realize that standing right here, right now, is the youngest you will ever be again... right?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;All of that happened in a split second, but I stood there for a solid minute taking it in, my head more silent than it had ever been. I just kind of froze, simultaneously shocked by the obviousness of the thought and by the fact that even though I&#39;d obviously &lt;em&gt;known&lt;/em&gt; that all along, that time only moves in one direction, that we only ever get older, I hadn&#39;t really internalized it until that moment.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I was 34 then, which seems like it was yesterday. Except it was the fall of 2001, and I was on my pre-tenure sabbatical, trying like crazy to finish the manuscript of my first book. It was not long after 9/11, and I was still having a hard time getting my brain to wrap itself around any number of things -- what was happening in the world around us, what I was trying to argue in my book, what time even was.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I had cause to remember this moment earlier today. I&#39;m 57 now, and there&#39;s some core part of me that is genuinely unsure how that happened. I can sit down and do the math and it all adds up, and yet it doesn&#39;t make sense to me at all -- &lt;em&gt;sense&lt;/em&gt; in the same internal way as that moment of realizing that I was only ever going to get older.&lt;/p&gt;
&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;
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