A different discipline

Sometimes this stuff keeps me up at night.

I might talk with a bunch of people about ideas, and I'm often composing things in my head during the day when I am around others. But I can't actually write unless I'm on my own. It's hard to concentrate enough to put a sentence together - so I find that I'm not very successful if I'm in a room full of other people. I tried that once or twice during my Makers' group (when my creative friends get together to work on our projects), and it was just a bust. It took me the full four hours to compose one essay, and I don't believe I've ever even gotten back to the blog to post that one. So what is the point of this post? What has kept me up tonight? Well, I want to answer one of the questions that we got frequently during our trip and that we continue to get now that we've completed our journey.

"How did we do it?"

"How did we find the motivation to continue on the trip when we ran into obstacles?" 

"What kind of problems did we run into and how did we keep going for all those months?" 

Maybe that's a couple of questions, but I think it's really just one. And it's one that Roger and I both struggle to answer, because the simplest thing to say is, "we always had a plan B." We knew if we had to, we could ship the bike home. We even joked from time to time about shipping the bike to France, where I could make up the blog by using Internet resources to find and post photos and do research about the places that we would have been riding through had we been back in the States! 

That was never a very real option for us, but it illustrates the degree to which our resources provided us with opportunities. We didn't have to do this trip - it was our choice - and we didn't suffer while we were doing it. In fact, Roger on this last leg just a couple weeks ago made the observation that we really had not had to "rough it," as he put it. This wasn't the first time he'd said that.  It came up frequently on our trip.  And every time this topic came up, I had to laugh. Maybe he had some romanticized notion about the hardships we'd endure as we traveled the country, but I told him multiple times that at the age of 58, I wasn't really interested in sleeping in a ditch! I didn't have any driving desire to experience some incredibly raw and taxing hardship or deprivation just to continue on this journey. That's not why I did it.  I'm old enough, and well enough set in my ways, that I enjoy my creature comforts. I was interested in the trip and I wanted to experience every day as fully as possible, but I don't feel the least bit deprived because we never had to camp on the side of the road!  Although we did have some discussion about whether that might be how we would cross the desert and complete this final push. And I carried an extra water bladder for 6 months in the expectation that I might need to fill it so that I could sleep in the desert off the side of the road. But we'd sent our camping equipment home before reaching Kingman two years ago. We figured to just blast across the long stretch and make it to the hotel in Ludlow - no camping. So there wasn't going to be any sleeping off in the desert the first time around. And the second time around, of course, we knew it would be really, really cold if we tried that, and we weren't planning to do so.

So, when I think about how I would respond to that question, what actually comes to mind is not how I found motivation to ride my bicycle everyday. That was fun and that was why we were there. That's what we set out to do. What actually impresses me the most about my own journey is that I found the discipline to maintain my blog, night after night, for six months. I kept that going because I really couldn't sleep if I didn't put my stories down everyday. It really was kind of a need in me, something that I had to do in order to make room the next day for the new experiences that we were going to have. And since returning home, there have been so many times that I have wanted to tell more of my story, to try and at least keep up with the things that were happening as we tried to get back out there and finish the ride. And yet - months would pass and I wouldn't write a thing!  

The most telling example of this is in the drafting of this particular post.

I had it in mind nearly 2 years ago. I often composed parts of it in my head, without writing them down, and finally one day last August when I was visiting my brother in Texas, I drafted what comes next and sent it to myself. I had a very strong desire to get it into the blog last fall so that I could post some catch-up stories before we actually got out there and finished the last run. And yet - I came home from Greg's house without posting the draft . . . and fall passed, and Christmas came and went, and then the first week of January . . . and I still hadn't gotten that draft posted. 

Yet when we did the ride itself, I managed to record each night of it!  I didn't have the computer - just my phone. But I wrote each evening before going to bed, capturing the events, thoughts and feelings of the dayl  But before that part o the trip - nothing. And since the trip - nothing!  Nearly a month has passed since we got home, and finally here I am, trying to put this to bed. It's 2:30 in the morning. And I'm sitting in the living room dictating this to my phone, with the anticipation that I'll get upstairs at some point tomorrow and flesh it out and find that second part that I wrote at Greg's, and put it all together and post it. But I don't know that I'm actually going to find the discipline to do it and that's ultimately what this post is about. We did this trip which many people view as an amazing accomplishment. They respond to our adventure with a sense of awe about how we mustered our will and found the motivation and determination to carry on. And I'm here to tell you -- taking a big chunk of your life to go do something specific like the bicycle trip we took, is nothing compared to harnessing your discipline to deal with something like this blog in the midst of the life that we all live everyday.

Perhaps it's best to just say it's a different kind of discipline. It requires setting aside the things that fill our lives every day when we are actually working, or caring for a home, or engaged in our communities, looking after children, visiting with family or friends, or taking care of obligations. Even keeping up with friends on social media, or trying to pay attention to the news, or enjoying a program on the television consumes time in our lives every day. We have to prepare meals, we wash our clothes, we clean our houses. If you are off on some great adventure, you don't do many of those things. If you have decided you're going to ride 50 to 60 miles everyday, then that's what you do. But you're not being distracted by committee meetings or sweeping up the kitchen or emptying the dishwasher. You ride those 50 miles because you don't have anything else to do!

I have at least half a dozen topics that are part of my story that I haven't written about yet, because I have not developed the discipline to get myself at the keyboard to capture those thoughts, to craft them, to edit myself, to find a photo, and to publish the post. I have a thousand reasons everyday why I don't do it. And if there's anyone reading this post that wonders whether or not they could take a trip like we did, whether or not they could ride a bicycle 10,000 miles - the answer is: sure! Anybody who has the time to spend and the financial resources to be away from their "real life" for a couple of months could do what we did. Because it's the real lives that we live that are so amazing to me.  Taking a 6 month vacation - how could any of us fail at that?! It's how any of us manage to accomplish anything at all given all the demands on our time while we're just doing what we do to "live" is the real mystery.

How did I feel about all this a couple of months ago, when I penned the following at my brother's house?  Read on.

On multiple occasions, both while we were on our journey and afterwards, I've been asked by people, "how did you do that?" Since I am usually standing right in front of the questioner, I can be pretty sure their focus is a question about how we got up every day and rode a bicycle for 50 to 60 miles. I mean, if that's not what they're interested in, they'll correct me as I begin to respond.

So I have been able to reply that we didn't consider it a burden, but rather an opportunity. Throughout our trip I usually experienced a real sense of freedom as well as luxury, perhaps something akin to the freedoms one might have experienced at the age of 20 taking a three-month backpacking trip across Europe. Make no bones about it, Roger and I understood that we were essentially on a six-month vacation. Who gets to do that? So it wasn't all that difficult, once you wrap your head around the idea that you're going to take a long vacation and spend it riding a bicycle, to recognize that everyday you're going to get up and ride your bicycle!

Granted, there were days when we were very tired. There were days when we looked at the weather or the terrain ahead of us and recognized it was going to be a very difficult day. But that's kind of like the joke about fishing. A bad day fishing is better than a good day in the office. If what you enjoy is fishing, then it is the act of fishing, including the challenges of finding the right spot, the right lure, the right casting technique, that turns you on. Those are the things that bring you joy. You also have a lot of joy when you bring in some nice fish, but there are people who fish all day and put the fish back in the water. So it's the accomplishment of having done what you set out to do that brings you the deepest joy and satisfaction.

Moving our bicycle, ourselves, and our stuff around the country for six months felt like that to me. There was comfort in the routine, even as there was recognition that each day would bring something different - some new puzzle to solve, some new crisis to avert, some disaster to remedy. My appreciation for Roger's MacGyver skills grew weekly! There wasn't anything we experienced that he was unable to fix. I myself got very handy with needle and thread, and made repeated repairs to our jerseys, our bags and our equipment. Duct tape and zip ties became our best friends! And so we made it around the country, stopping only when we were forced to by the accident that ended our trip.

We are trying to get back to Kingman to finish our trip. It's more than symbolic. We both feel a deep need to complete this broken circle. It is hard to believe that it will be 2 years soon since our accident. One of the advantages of having shared aspects of our trip through Facebook is that I often get a reminder of our time on the road from those silly "remember this?" postings that Facebook brings back to you. I know from those that we were at Ashokan Family Camp about 2 years ago. Soon we'll be traveling through Tennessee and making for the Natchez Trace. By September we'll be approaching Texas and our visit with friends and family there. And the largest part of October will include our trip back along Old Route 66. Good times for sure! And bittersweet also. I know this because I got to relive all of it last year when the memories were just one year old.

So, what is this different discipline? What do I mean by that? Well, the first discipline is just sticking with the task, in this case a monumental one perhaps, and doing something everyday because it's what you set out to do. But that's the easy part! The harder discipline, it turns out, is managing what happens in your real life. Taking care of all the stuff that needs to be done when you maintain a home, or have a job, interact with friends or raise a family. Anybody, and I'm pretty sure I mean anybody, could take a 6-month vacation and do exactly what they want for half a year. Really, where's the challenge in that?

The challenge comes in just living your life and in that frame of reference, accomplishing anything at all! As an example, examine my own efforts. I have wanted to continue my tale. I have any number of stories to tell about our path back to Kingman over the last two years. To my mind, those stories may be more compelling, may be more inspirational, than the story I could tell about how we played for 6 months. And yet, I have not been able to find the discipline to put myself in front of the computer and capture my thoughts. My days are so full with the mundane activities of life in this time and place that I haven't been able to break through that detritus and do something very simple that I figured out how to do almost every day for 6 months running. With pictures! So I'm struggling to get the wheels turning again. 

I'm going to give it my best shot. I'm going to try and go back through the things that have happened in the past year-and-a-half and bring my story up-to-date. I want to try and capture what happened after the glory of the bike ride. Because in the past two years, roughly, Roger and I have had had two bicycle accidents. I fell, and broke my wrist, prompting a later need for surgery to correct carpal tunnel syndrome that flared up in my recuperation. I've had a trigger finger release surgery (and need another one!). Roger has had another bicycle accident of his own. I was diagnosed with sleep apnea and AFib. I began a new career, teaching at the University. All this!  In two years! To be honest, the accumulation of these injuries and illnesses make me question how we ever made it around the country on a bicycle! But we did, and we're going to go out there and finish the trip despite these setbacks. It's just taking so long! And in the middle of those accidents came recuperation, recovery, training to ride again, and finally - joy on a bicycle. That was a long time coming, but it did come back. And I'd like to celebrate that as well as lay out what this part of the journey has been like.

So buckle up. If you're interested in the story, they'll be something more to read. My hope is to clear my mind of all these things that I keep feeling like I have to capture. My hope is to be able to discover that discipline that I was able to exercise during our trip until I manage to tell the rest of the story.