Struggle

Yesterday was a good day. I biked with trains passing right beside me on one side and semi trucks on the other feeling like the plucky hero caught between forces much bigger than himself. I unexpectedly found a free shower in the village of Mason City and took a freezing shower I would have hated just days before but loved then. I came to a lake in the little town of Ansley that looked so amazing. I took a picture only to realize that the beauty of that moment couldn't be captured so simply as making a digital copy of the light that was striking my eyes or my camera. I sinfully bought an ice cream cookie sandwich in Broken Bow and adored every moment of eating it in the shade behind the store.

And then, because I didn't feel terribly welcome in Broken Bow (pictures will explain) and I wanted to make my ride to Thedford the next day shorter, I came on to Anselmo. Then everything came apart. I biked through just five feet of grass in the park here and filled all my tires with thorns. And then, like a total idiot, somehow, in the wind, the dark, my stressed out incompetence I lost the spring from my axle. And that was that. I was ruined. Today, I had to call my dad to come save me, and I've never felt so wretched.

I had something I was going to say before all this. I was going to say some standard stuff about how we forget the simple joys, how we live lifes that overstimulate our pleasure receptors until they fry, and we forget how awesome ice cream and showers and such things we take for granted really are, how we need the contrast of difficulty and discomfort to really enjoy its absence.

...But now I've hit the far end, beyond the discomfort, the depression, the dismay, the thoughts about the thousand ways I messed up, and the guilt of asking so much of someone else to rescue me from my failings. There's a balance I guess, just enough struggle to be alive, to appreciate living, but not to be defeated. And it's the funniest things, not the heat, the wind, the miles of nothing, but some tiny thorns and a spring...

My lesson is learned, my bike is frail, as are my spirits. But this is just another setback, not the end. My bike will get fixed, and I will press on. A wise man told me it isn't the setbacks that define you, but what you do with them. And who can judge me in my failings at something most wouldn't even try?