Decompartmentalizing

The acquaintances in my life are separated into four fairly distinct groups: I know the teachers I work with, the yogis I practice with, the cyclists I ride with, and the rest—fellow parents, old friends, and neighbors—who I guess I mostly drink, eat, and hang out with.

There doesn’t tend to be much overlap among them.

The yogis, for instance, I hardly ever see outside the studio—and I know only a handful of names—even though with many I have had this strangely intimate but totally detached experience of bending and sweating profusely together three to five times a week for half a dozen years or more.

As for my fellow instructors, all of whom I really appreciate and deeply respect: our time together is pretty much restricted to school. In five years, I’ve only been to one of their houses; I’ve never opened my home to any of them.

My cycling buddies are another class altogether; although Mimi’s met them at the FHR and Jen made the acquaintance of several at the Patchkit, for the most part, their realm is a completely different orbit I travel in.

So it was particularly swell for me last night when, on the regular Thursday evening .83 ride, I had a chance to see two of these groups—the cyclists and the teachers—together in one place for a while.

.83 rode from Westlake Center, over freeway and down Interlaken to Montlake and then up the Ravenna ravine through Northgate with a stop at the Taco truck and ended up at the Pinehurst Pub where a group of Cascadia teachers was celebrating the end of quarter with beer and conversation.

Our wild bunch of around twenty cyclists arrived en masse and pretty took over the joint to the delighted cries of the table of teachers. I felt like the Marlon Brando leading the cavalry, a weird combination to be sure—but so was the one in the Pub.