About a year ago, I visited Kigali, Rwanda, the land of 1000 hills and 1000 motorbikes. And yes, it is as clean as you have heard it is. It is a fascinating place with the sense of still being in Africa but with a first world edge.
I was buying souvenirs to take home, and this postcard, captured below, jumped out at me. There was something about the image of a person pedalling on a bicycle that resonated with my soul. I bought the card and framed it. For the next few months and now up to a year later, I kept being drawn to images or artworks of bicycles. My soul was yearning for something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on…
Our Reticular Activating System (RAS) is a diffuse network of nerve pathways in the brainstem connecting the spinal cord, cerebrum and cerebellum and mediating the overall level of consciousness.
It filters out the unnecessary information and lets the important stuff through. “It is the reason why when you learn a new word, you then start hearing it everywhere. It is why you can tune out a crowd full of talking people yet immediately snap to attention when someone says your name or something that at least sounds like it. It takes what you focus on and creates a filter for it, then sifts through the data you encounter and presents only the pieces that are important to you.” (nice explanation thanks to Tobias van Schneider 22 Jne 2017).
My soul was trying to tell me something and my RAS was working together with it, drawing my attention to numerous bicycles.
I began to realise that what the bicycle epitomised to me was a sense of freedom and flexibility. It was still a vehicle of transportation but the vehicle could be turned with a gentle turn of the handlebars. It was a low-cost vehicle, so maintenance was not going to be an issue, and most of all it allowed me to decide if I went slow or fast, with the wind in my hair and the sun on my back. (Rainy days didn’t come into the evaluation).
Once I concluded that the bicycle was a symbol for me in this season of my life, I was curious about what symbolism it had in history.
“The Bicycle as a symbol of progress, of renewal, of promising times ahead. This is not a new concept. Indeed, it has been around since the invention of the bicycle. Many bicycle posters at end of the 19th century featured promising themes like liberation, progress, freedom.
In this beautiful poster, there is a lot of metaphorical gameplay. The young woman is riding a bicycle to the future. Dressed in white and seemingly casting fresh flowers as though leaving a trail for us to follow. The old woman is looking backwards to the past as she sits in a bed of thorns, almost resigned to the fact that the future – the bicycle – is passing her by.”
http://www.copenhagenize.com/2012/03/bicycle-symbolism-towards-future.html
4 years previously I had this thing with snails and felt it was symbolic for me to slow down and take stock of what I had. My youngest daughter who was 5 years old at the time, painted me an abstract picture of a snail. I’ve had it stuck in every work space I have been in since then. It is currently in my Grade 7 classroom, where I see it every day. If I remember, when I go back to the classroom in September, I will take a picture and add it to this post. The message has now become a part of who I am and have learned to value slowing down. I took these pictures of some visitors in my garden to make sure I was still remembering the lesson.
Prior to the bicycle the symbolism my RAS was zooming in on an image of a little bird perched on a brightly coloured children’s rope ladder. It related to my situation at work and as the situation changed, so I felt the position of the bird change. At first the bird was perched on a middle rung, then I had a sense that I wanted to fly, but the bird in the picture wasn’t ready to fly. A year later, the sense was, now the bird can fly. And fly it did.
It sounds weird, but it’s real. Our sub-conscious is always trying to communicate with us. Our inner genius is trying to share some life direction. We all need to create space in our minds and souls so we can hear and see. Images stick in our minds more distinctly than even our best loved quotes. So if you have a best loved quote, reinforce its voice in your life, by finding an image that speaks the truth of your present season and allowing the image to keep you focused and centred.
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