My bike is yoga
Photo credit: Booker T. Sessoms 2022, Collage: Marianne Møllmann
I still remember the exact moment I gave myself permission to settle in New York City. I had been living there for 5 years — longer than I had stayed anywhere since childhood — and had recently figured out where to sail — also not something I had done regularly since I was a child.
The growing feeling of possibilities lodged in those two factors (longevity and the sea) empowered me to think differently about belonging than I had for ages. “If only I could commute by bike, it would be as if I were actually home,” I remember saying to friend. He looked at me blank-faced. “So why don’t you,” he countered. I bought a scrappy heavy-as-a-tank bike two days later, on which I went to work, picked up my daughter from school, and commuted to marina all across the city for years to come. It felt like everything was suddenly much more accessible. It felt like the city all of a sudden had become mine.
Looking back, I didn’t understand at the time that the bike was such a turning point. I did way harder things in NYC both before and after buying that first bike. I went through immigration processes that felt endless. I navigated the US education system for my child. I divorced. But nothing helped me feel as settled as being on that bike.
I thought about that process this week as I biked through Berlin’s shifting neighborhoods to visit friends in the north and the west. Biking is how I make sense of any city — if I explore with public transportation, I would know what stop each landmark I visit is close to, but now how they relate to each other. The city would feel like an amalgam of one-offs, not a solid web of connected joy.
There is an other element too, though: the process of experiencing a place in my body through movement. I do this with yoga too. Or put differently, this is what yoga is: a way to be present and aligned with what is. When I bought that first bike in NYC, I had never done yoga — that all came later. But my bike helped me get there, in all senses of that word.
