Life in Lockdown - A Lesson in Living (Alice Lemkes)

Life in Lockdown - A Lesson in Living

By Alice Lemkes

I got quite used to shifting heavy and awkward loads during the Resolution Race last Hogmanay. But I didn’t anticipate how hauling Lee for six days might prepare me for a cross-transfer of resources during the Coronavirus lockdown.

After a period of taking stock and rolling with the waves of fear and stress surrounding the pandemic back in March, and the urgency to mobilise, to help, to be of immediate use, we paused. With an uncertain future reaching out, and all races and trips cancelled, we realised we could stave some frustration by redeploying our cargo bike skills within the local community.

Omnium Cargo were kind enough to let us keep one cargo bike after we reached Copenhagen. A dream come true for a once-upon-a-time courier in London delivering coffee beans by cargo bike. I often look back on that period as the most care-free I had felt in employment and wonder whether I’d ever achieve such job satisfaction again. The cargo bike has since been taking up the entryway of our tenement building. It has been waiting for this moment. Lee and I now ride six days a week, split between afternoon grocery deliveries for a zero-waste social enterprise and evenings spent shuttling surplus food between supermarkets, chefs, and hostels, returning home windswept and tired-eyed.

There is nothing quite as satisfying to me as a fully loaded bike. Whether that is loaded with other people’s groceries; a mountain of surplus bread and crate-fulls of other edibles balanced unconvincingly on the platform; or whether that is camping and cooking equipment for a solo-trip. I have everything I need to perform the tasks I have set out to do, and over and above speed comes autonomy and the empowering awareness arising from the familiar ache of my grafting thighs that I am creating motion and journeying with purpose.

What a privilege it is to spend part of my day outside feeling free and autonomous and purposeful like this, having redeployed my resources (a cargo bike, my time, my good physical health) to connect with communities that are having a harder time getting the things they need. It’s not without its stresses; with no clear system for redistribution we are often riding round Edinburgh attempting to shift food before it goes bad - connecting with local chefs, or reaching out to friends to save waste. It’s tiring, things often go wrong, and it always takes longer than we expect. On the other hand, we are finding a sense of connection to a local community: I collected catering pots from the Quaker Meeting House and took them to a friend’s mum so she could turn the crates of root vegetables picked up from Waitrose into hot nutritious meals for a shelter. Ironically, I am more connected to the city and the people in it now than in the previous six months after moving here.

But it isn’t the only way I’m feeling more connected. This lockdown has softened the business-as-usual of my anxious brain, and - surprisingly - enabled me to access much of what I escape on adventures to obtain.

Adventure tends to be about doing. But all the while I crave simply being. Often I go on an adventure to escape. Escape an acute period of stress, anxiety, debilitating storylines and limiting beliefs, attachments to external objects, a sense of lacking autonomy. So I run. I go off in order to meet myself again. To take a breath from narratives and step out of the spiral. I go in order to be. But in amongst all of the going and doing, I am still dogged by “should.”

I have realised that my adventures have always been laced with self-improvement, and always with a ‘should’ at the forefront: should be better at this self-supported thing, should be fitter, should be more inquisitive, should be more present, should be on my phone less, should be able to cope, should return a better version of me, should certainly return leaner....Isn’t ‘should’ the most exhausting thing? It is ‘should’ that gets in the way of presence. And the ‘simply being' I crave eludes me because I have held on too tightly to all the ways I am not good enough.

Six months ago, I finally left London for good. I relocated away from friends and regular plans, and a calendar that would be full for weeks at a time. I thought I might finally find stillness, but found that ‘should’ followed me: the things I should be doing, friends I should be making, nature I should be connecting with. And, of course, I should be getting stronger, faster, more productive, more peaceful, more playful, more creative, more introspective, more connected. I was still living life a few months ahead: toward the next adventure, toward the beginning of the race season; a long to-do list stretching out of bikes to fettle with, kit to try out, bike-packing systems to hone, long rides to be ridden and mid-week efforts to be completed.

Safe in the arms of purposeful future plans.

And then Coronavirus eradicated all of them. Hit Pause. But this pause hasn’t been an interruption to normal life; it has been a lesson in living now. There are no races to plan for, no hobbies to begin, no training regime, no other people’s achievements to contrast my daily activities with and compare and fail against. I can begin each day with an intention: how would I like to start my day? It is actually the only thing that matters.

The lockdown has afforded me space. Stripped back from ‘should’ I have a deeper awareness of what I miss, what is important, and why I cherish these things.

Don’t get me wrong. I really do miss adventures: the self-propulsion into new places; the space; the connectedness to earth and to new people and to myself. I miss the farce and discomfort, the hardships and the suffering: the sleepless nights from frog and grasshopper chorus and mosquito-bitten eyes; single-track that cannot even be pushed through; lunches on petrol station forecourts and basking in pure filth. I miss it all.

But I am cherishing the playfulness that comes from not having pressure, the inquisitiveness that comes from not having pressure, the noticing that comes from not having pressure. Simply being. Whilst the natural world is jubilantly bursting into life before me, Lockdown has been a time of excitement and possibility. I hope I can find ways to stay connected to my locale, my neighbours, and my self, when I am eventually able to scarper further afield. I’m looking forward to taking these new, kinder perspectives back into the world of competition and comparison and hope to retain this anchoring that will enable me to enter races with curiosity.

Alice Lemkes

Recent escapee from England, most likely to be found riding a cargo bike around Edinburgh and attempting to fit a PhD into a more itinerant and adventurous lifestyle.

Catch Alice on Instagram @lemkiss and Twitter @alicelemkes.