Most mornings, when I drive to work, I think about the ride I’ll be taking in the summer, kind of the reason behind this blog in the first place. Frankly, I am sometimes overwhelmed by the idea of renting a motorcycle in San Francisco, riding east to Yosemite, then up north to Klamath Falls in Oregon, on to Bend and then over to the California coast and down along 1/101 back to San Francisco.
I have written about the genesis of the idea for the ride and no need to repeat it here. It has everything to do with giving myself a gift for having made it to seventy and still standing. Truthfully, if I kept repeating why I was going on this solo journey, I’d never get passed introducing it.
Let’s get back to the morning drive. I have moments of doubt and palpable anxiety about pulling off this ride. We can begin with the fact that few people in the world have the ability to get lost as easily as I do. I will be riding on a rented Harley, which will bring its own challenges because I have only ridden Hondas that are far lighter and less powerful. I will be riding on some attention getting roads. I need to pack minimal equipment, clothing and electronics that will insure my safety and comfort. I need to communicate my ride back to the thousands of eyeballs, open wide to read the next blog installment. As if that isn’t enough to bring a grown man to his knees in prayer, technology is not my friend and I need a modest level of competence to pull off what I have in mind for the ride, including daily photographs, audio bytes and stories, uploaded from the field to the blog
I never think I’m alone when I feel uncertainty about the unknown. Most of us mask it pretty well, but it is there and you can bet your ass on it. Speaking of ass, I am having minor surgery involving one of my lower cheeks. When I realized a mushy golf ball had somehow putted itself into my interior posterior, CANCER and my imminent passing took me over for at least a day, until I calmed down. This episode, soon to be resolved, made me think again about how all of us take life for granted. not a new thesis by any means. When there is even a hint of the man in black in the wings, we have these transient obsessions about what we really need to do or say, all the unfinished business. Things like this quietly boil in a cauldron of emotion only we feel and hardly ever show.
One of the jobs I want to take on is to express some things we all have so much trouble with and maybe find even a small place where my writing and vulnerability resonates with you. So, I am planning a motorcycle ride, a reasonably bold undertaking and I have some degree of anxiety about it. The honest truth is my ride is a celebration, a party for myself. In spite of all the unnecessary shit I have put myself through, here I am and I am going to do something that pushes me further into the open arms of life’s embrace.
My ride has everything to do with celebrating my life, not a perfect life, just a life. I am greeted by my fallibility from the moment I sit on my Zen cushion each morning, until I lay quietly in bed, as the day rides off into the darkness. The only way we grow is to keep pushing against the invisible roadblocks created by our fear.