The ride this morning in the brisk early air is responsive despite the wet streets from an evening and night full of rain showers. Sunshine and I are really loving these new Pilot Road 5 tires, very solid wet performance. The Road 4's they replaced tended to slop around on wet paint and tar snakes, but the Road 5's have "some" hold on even these nasty surfaces. I park and find a quiet spot to kick off my work day.
Sunshine looks good, even behind glass. But life behind glass ain't all that - life is about living, not watching. Sunshine was designed to integrate with her rider and move through challenges. She was definitely not meant to sit still!
I want to say something meaningful here, something about living versus watching life go by, but I really am forced to check myself after the long dinner and post-dinner conversation we had with friends/neighbors of ours last night.
Life is what you make of it - and what you think of it.
Each and every person gets to decide for themselves what makes them happy or sad, how they live or how they don't. That amazing freedom of thought and expression are privileges which this great country of ours exemplifies and promotes. It's something no other place in the world really has or promotes anywhere near as much as us Americans! Nowhere else, really, not like here.
But even so, most people choose a limited view of themselves, and then go on selecting reason after reason why that limited view is valid. "I'm afraid" or "sick" or "allergic", "too old" or "too young", "too weak" or "too strong", "too big" or "too small", "too pretty" or "not pretty enough", ... "I'm too important for THAT" or "I'm not important enough for THAT", ... "I'm too rich", "I'm too poor", "too classy" or "not classy enough", .... On and on.
On and on the people all around me (a) give themselves limitations and then (b) spend the rest of their waking hours in an ever-steady effort to justify them. It's like some horrible feedback loop of limitation and justification, of wound and wound-speak, of disfunction and validation. Everywhere I turn, people are boxing themselves up into countless labeled boxes, and then complaining about while also being comforted by their self-critical cardboard cages.
For a guy with (a) no fear and (b) no limitations, it's absolutely maddening to see the world around me and the people in it spending their waking hours this way. What a waste of human potential.
But I'm just a guy on a bike, not a wizard and not a fortuneteller. I don't know how people's lives are 'meant' to work out, or even if they are 'meant' for anything at all. And nobody knows best for me either, that goes without saying.
I just need to check into my and only my life and let others sort themselves out ... or not ... I guess I just have to learn to step back a bit.
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