I was an observer at the later part of last Sunday’s racing and I had a great viewing spot at the back ‘hot dog’ turn. The main difference between the B grade bunch and the A grade bunch was the speed around the turn and the closeness to the limit they were pushing. The A graders were straightening out of the turn just centimetres from the concrete crash barriers – in fact, I saw Kevin Black just millimetres away from hitting the barriers on one of the fast laps. I think he was suddenly shocked by how close he was to scrapping some handlebar tape off.

And in the final lap, it got so close that handlebars were locked together. So close to a pile up, yet they all stayed up.

We play with closeness when we race – yet we try to maintain a safe distance at other times. People value their ‘personal space’. You can get people quite worked up by encroaching into that space. A car passing a cyclist with less than a metre to spare will get an angry  response from the bike rider. Cyclists hate cars and trucks getting too close as they ride handlebars to handlebars together.

Many personal relationships are aborted when one party is too imposing and wants to get real close. Yet, the richness of a relationship is in how deeply entangled it is.

The terms “living close to the edge” and “sailing close to the wind” describe the euphoria of being close to the limit of the life experience.  A “near death experience”brings us close to the feeling of an afterlife. And whilst we do not realise it, everything in life hinges on closeness.

When you are in a forest of gum trees, all the gum leaves look the same. Yet there are no two gum leaves that are exactly the same. But while they are not the same, they are close.

Consider the beginning of life. How close are neighbouring sperms in getting to the eggs first? Just think that I could have been born a girl…it was that close.

We have smartphones and ipads because we discovered how to pack microprocessors real close. Now we can talk to someone hallway across the globe and they sound like they are right close beside you. We are now networked – hooked together with or without wires and distance is now measured in micro seconds.

There are even suggestions that we are all “ONE”. We are all so close that there is no separation. No beginning and no ending.

The concept of space is created to give us the impression of separation to set us apart – but in reality we are closer than we think.

Day follows night so closely that there is no separating the two extremes. Every day, we live on the knife edge of Life and Death. The two follow each other so closely that one cannot exist without the other.

When the peloton finishes close together, all the individual riders get the ‘same time’. In life, we may all be completely different and far apart on the success scale. That is the illusion. But we are really so close together … and at the end of the life journey, we will all get the ‘same time’ . Heaven and hell is so closely entwined that we will all end up in essentially the same place.