Unlike my last trip, which I viewed, somewhat contradictorily, as both a young man’s errand and a farewell to youth, this one, at age 57, has been about my encroaching mortality, no doubt about it, and when I compare the two journeys I recognize in the current one the frailty of age. I’m slower. I’m less eager to ride long days and long hours and ride with the sun going down. I’m much more concerned about finding a place to stay and knowing early in the day where I’ll be spending the night.
His experience is not mine. In the past three years, I've gotten into the best shape I've ever been in my life. I was a cowardly young man, not given to adventure, and I'm not given to adventure now, although when my excellent wife drags me on a trip, I invariably have a good time.
His story, though, is stirring, and he speaks about giving time to the experience:
This time, while I won’t say that I won’t be ready for the trip to end when it does, I’m feeling the different pleasures of delayed gratification.
I’m feeling the pleasures of contrariness, too. Why is everyone trying to rush me?
People have been telling me that the tough part of my cross-country bicycle journey was behind me, or that I was almost finished, or that the rest would be easy — or some related sentiment — ever since I crossed the Continental Divide, and several friends and readers wrote to express the absurdly wrong idea that it was going to be all downhill from there. When I reached the Mississippi River at its source in northern Minnesota, a grocery clerk made sure to inform me that I was closer to the finish than the start. In Minneapolis, in Madison, Wis., and again in Chicago, the friends I met up with offered congratulations as if I were already taking a victory lap.
I was taken with his article. Go check it out.
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