Lessons from the bike ride home

Is there always something to be learned from the world around us?

For example on my bicycle ride home just now, an hour between growing fields of corn and livestock, which included a continuous pelting of insects on my face (making me wonder about the nature of probability, since the surface area of my cheeks far exceeds that of my eyes and yet the vast majority of my airborn friends took the latter path, or maybe I am underestimating the reaction times and mischevious self-destructive impulses of bugs).

When I squinted my eyes nearly closed I had less insect-cornea encounters.  So was the lesson that some carefully selected blindness can be useful?  For example in helping alleviate the spiritual exhaustion that can come with monitoring climate change or politics?

Or was the lesson there when I decided to open my eyes fully, risking the bugs (which scored two more direct hits) but then really noticing the gorgeous maroon color of the soil, perfectly damped by this almost maternal mist, under the vociferously green grass, freshly washed, and hearing the squirps of the half dozen ducklings swimming obediently close to their mother, forming a spatter of little brown forms offset by the impressive plumage of the mallard swimming a few feet away?  (And what percent of the western world still cannot hear the word “plumage” without thinking of Monty Python?)

Was there a lesson in the traffic, the same lesson to be found every day in traffic everywhere, when cars raced past me as if their hurry were legitimate, even swerving into oncoming traffic to pass each other, while I plodded along on my patient bicycle, then a few minutes later I was passing them while they sat in traffic or at stoplights?

And that reliable pace, utterly unhindered by any trace of haste, got me home with perfect timing, just as it was starting to rain, so I got to feel those myriad perfect kisses of the first rain drops, and then came into my apartment as it opened up more, and now this lovely cup of tea is steaming cooperatively close at hand, a team player to my enjoyment of the moment.

I don’t know, but I sure do like the rain.