Tonight my neighbor Andrew emailed me a last-minute invitation to see a screening of the documentary “The Greening of Southie” and since I didn’t have any firm plans, I decided to go.

By the end of the evening, I had:

• Riden my bike to Coolidge Corner after work
• Eaten Pizza at Upper Crust
• Browsed for half hour at the Brookline Booksmith
• Watched a great documentary that telled a story about green building in Boston
• Listened to a stimulating Q&A with the filmmaker and the director of Nexus
• Run into two other friends, Saundra and Rhonda.
• Biked home on a mild summer evening.

These are a few of my favorite things, and I seems right to acknowledge how many of them fell together in one ordinary Monday evening.

I’ve been noticing how often I get myself into mental ruts where I cycle through the same negative thoughts, looping through my familiar anxieties, self-criticisms, pessimism, and so forth, until it’s hard to remember exactly on which track my passions and beliefs really lie.

But tonight I jumped the rails a while and when I got on my bike to ride home, I was flush with clarity. Biking became an idea I was glad to think over and over again from Brookline to JP. Without the distractions of shifting, my single gear bike gave me a one-track mind freed up to peddle outside my customary routes.

It won’t be long before I find myself riding the old rails again, but I figure the more times I stop to pay attention to nights like these, the better I’ll get at derailing.