Contemplating a bike commute.

How do you overcome the lethargy of fear? Peel yourself from the couch slap yourself awake from the anesthetic effect of the television? Give up the safety that's made you lazy? I used to bike commute all the time. It was out of necessity, I had no money, but I had a great bike. It was a city, I think, far less suited for bike commuting than the city I live in now. Of course thirty years have passed and who knows attitudes of drivers may have improved since then. So why am I so hesitant to hop on and ride again? Fear is a great paralyzer.
  I'm less afraid of the aggressive or angry driver than the distracted one. I drive everyday for work and I know how distracted I can become and I have to re-focus my attention on the road at times. But this has been realized many times over by all who take to the roads in anything less than an armored personnel carrier. Drivers are far more distracted it seems than when I was a bike commuter. A phone call during travel required a stop at a pay phone. Text messages were carried by the postal service. More kids rode to and from school so drivers may have been more aware of cyclists. Maybe the world was a safer place or it just seemed so because I was younger and invincible.
 So recognizing my own failings of attention span behind the wheel I think therein lies the crux of my fear. I need to and I would argue everyone needs to live more in the moment. To be where they are, to meditate on the thing they are doing at any given moment. I'm not talking about a dream-like meditative state where you leave your body on the way to some nirvana enlightenment, though that has it's place, I'm speaking of the zen of hyper-focus.  I'm a much better driver when at the end of the trip I can recall details of the trip.  Even the seemingly irrelevant details like the water stains on the Merita building, the butterfly dancing over the dead tree branch, the red car inching closer to my lane. Writing this it sounds like distractions but when I'm experiencing it I think I was absolutely in the moment. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink, defines it as "thin slicing," or the ability of the brain to receive multiple external stimuli and in the blink of an eye pare it down to only what you need to react. It's something that can be improved with practice.
   None of this helps overcome the fear of taking on the roads. But it is what would attract me to bike commuting. It'll force me to be more in the moment. Whether it's a slower pace, the physical exertion, or the fear of a painful death, I would have the "hyper focus" needed for survival. The thin slicing: bike lane, dog on the loose, birds overhead, that's a nice house, cars too close, exit strategy.  Focusing on the present can actually help prepare you for the future. Confidence comes with practice as does improved focus. Demonstrating that confidence has the power to affect not just yourself but can affect the behavior of drivers around you. I say this with a bit of blind faith, but if I mine my memory banks there was a time when I had that confidence and I survived.