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.
