Faith and Values: New bike help reopen eyes to rediscover the familiar

This summer I added a fifth bike to my fleet – a shiny red Trek Checkpoint with knobby tires that would let me explore the maze of farm roads on the Palouse.

After six years in Pullman (13 in Washington), I’d ridden every paved road worth riding, some of them dozens of times. The familiar routes were losing their appeal.

But this wasn’t just about knowing the roads too well – it was a common pattern of mine. I get restless when things become routine, when the challenge disappears.

Before I moved to Washington, I moved to a new state and a new newsroom every two or three years, eager to find different adventures and landscapes.

Over a decade in one state is a personal record, and I was getting anxious about it. And here in Pullman, the same small-town rhythms that once felt comfortable were starting to feel confining.

Looking back, I wonder how much of that restlessness was healthy exploration and how much was simply fleeing the hard work of going deeper rather than wider. There’s a difference between seeking new horizons and avoiding the invitation to truly inhabit where you already are.

Those first gravel rides taught me something I should have learned years ago: I’d been looking for wonder in distant places while ignoring the sacred ground beneath my wheels. The Palouse I thought I knew was just the paved version.

Those asphalt roads showed me the Palouse’s edges, its official routes and scenic overlooks. But gravel roads took me into its heart – down unmarked farm tracks where combines had worn deep ruts, past forgotten homesteads, over abandoned railroad tracks invisible from the main highways.

This wasn’t just a new way to ride; it was a new way to see.

Instead of cycling through the landscape, I was finally cycling into it – noticing the light filtering through the wheat stubble and learning to read the stories written in every abandoned barn and overgrown fence line.

Contemplatives have always known what I was slowly discovering: that presence, not movement, reveals the sacred. The Benedictines call it “stability” – the commitment to stay put long enough to see what’s actually there. The Zen tradition speaks of “beginner’s mind” – approaching the familiar as if for the first time. Both point toward the same truth: We’re not always called to new places. Sometimes the deepest call is to new depths in familiar ground.

It’s not that the Palouse has changed in my years here. But my capacity to receive it has. Those gravel roads were always there, waiting for me to find them.

We all have gravel roads waiting in the margins of our everyday worlds – unmapped paths that reveal new wonders in old ground. The restless heart that once drove me from place to place is learning a different rhythm: that home can be both anchor and adventure, that the deepest journeys often happen within a few miles of where we already stand.

My new bike is in the garage now, covered in dust and mud from my last ride and ready for the next one. The maps I study now aren’t of distant states but of the gravel networks spreading like capillaries through these rolling hills. Each unmarked road promises another conversation with this place I’m finally learning to call home.

Tracy Simmons, a longtime religion reporter, is a Washington State University scholarly assistant professor and the editor of FāVS News.