The night I became a passenger in my own skin

A perspective on sentience, from a weird bike ride in an ordinary place

Welcome to the pages of my Travel Journal, featuring meandering portrayals of life on the road. For lighter reading, you might prefer my series of Sketches.

I wrote this a few years ago, and it still comes back to haunt me. It attempts to describe one of the strangest nights of my life – a psychological flutter that appeared to come out of the blue. (No funny substances, honest.) I think I’ve shared this once before but can’t remember where, so here it is again, with a few tweaks, including a footnoted helping hand from Jim Carrey.

---

Flicking through my Facebook feed last night, I stumbled on a post from a friend that spooked me. It brought disappointment, and a little anger, and somehow out of that sudden knot of emotion grew the simple urge to get on my bike and ride – just ride into the night.

That vaguely abstract idea mushroomed into a consuming impulse, and with it came a torrent of energy, optimism, and a glittering awareness of both the minute and the massive. This was one of the strangest experiences of my life; my synapses were massaged into a fizzing, curiously enervated stillness – like the potency within the tip of a conductor’s raised baton, reeled into a weightless pause before the downbeat’s release. And I knew that within the spirit of that moment was the essence of something I wanted to be.

"Initially, pilgrimage […] had been perceived and represented as ‘anti-travel’. In Christian dogma and culture, curiositas, that is, curiosity about the world, is a sin, related to the Original Sin and the Transgression, hence identified with humanity’s Fall.”¹

Out on the road, dim tarmac blurred beneath the beam of my light as it sliced a silvered tunnel of vision through the night. Speed was only a vague sensation. Wind and stars whirled as one.

Well after midnight, now four hours from home, I rested my bike against a hedgerow at the entrance to a black field where the damp soil had recently been sown with a winter crop. An urban glow leaked up from the eastern horizon. The night was clammy and the air was dead; no owls, no bats, no crack of pressing paws.

I stood with eyes closed and, driven by an instinct I am yet to understand, flung my awareness to the corners of the field – and then out over the plane of Earth and into the distant arch of space above, whose stars were smudged from view by thin blankets of invisible vapours. And I seeped into the night.

And in that instant of flight came the vivid and ecstatic awareness of something I can still recall and feel but which barely survives transcription into any words I can muster. It goes something like this: Everything, everything about my subjective world, my perceiving and my feeling and my thinking, is part of the totality of me. I inhabit myself, as I am inhabited by myself. I am both the thinker and the thought, the sail and the wind. I think myself. And so do you.²

Perhaps somewhere within the midst of that double-helical dance of mind and matter, between the objective and subjective, the concrete and the perceived, there exists the ineffable third thread we call sentience.

Foxes look questioningly at a solitary light sliding through their nocturnal world. Rats are caught off-guard. I was an alien in this perfectly ordinary place they call home.

1. Melman, Billie (2002) ‘The Middle East / Arabia: “the cradle of Islam”’ in Hulme, P (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p108.

2. YouTube threw me a lifeline recently – a clip of Jim Carrey in an interview, nailing this idea better than I could.

“Jim Carrey is a great character and I was lucky to get the part. But I don’t think of that as me any more. I used to be a guy experiencing the universe, and now I feel like the universe experiencing a guy.”

That statement encapsulates a greater journey than I can claim to have travelled, but it points to the same idea (or unprovable hypothesis) which struck me as true that night on the edge of the empty field.