A Ride Along Friend Sparked Some Thoughts

I was riding my bike and looked down to find a very shiny, very cute bug. I don’t usually call bugs cute, but this one was. “What’s your name?” I wondered. “Might it be something in the human realm? Crystal? Horacio? Lila? Or maybe it could be something more conceptual like horses sometimes have?”

That’s when I decided this bug could be named That’s How the Cookie Crumbles.

That’s How the Cookie Crumbles rode with me for a good while. My new friend crawled around sometimes, but mostly stayed in a little nook near my brakes. We journeyed through multiple parts of town. As I pedaled, I thought about how this bug doesn’t know anything about the larger geography, the town’s infrastructure, or even what a bike is. But nevertheless, we traveled together. I’m sure That’s How the Cookie Crumbles knows all kinds of things I’ve never known either.

And here I was, one miniscule human being, flying on a rock throughout space as I rode a bike.

I, too, am a Ride Along, with a multitude of others — fellow humans, green bugs, and more species than I can count, constantly propelled by gravitational forces in a universe of which I, and we, know next to nothing, really. At least on the scale of what could be known.

And it is a very good ride, isn’t it? Or at least, it could be.

And when it isn’t, why can’t we see that our borders mean nothing? In the grand scheme of things, we are riding along on a rock together, and we could just as readily honor one another rather than separate, violate, starve, deport, and malign.

We could marvel. We could journey. We could celebrate. We could protect.

— Renee Roederer