I’ve been missing adventure.
It’s been nearly two weeks since I finished my xUS bike trip, followed by an 11-day road trip return, with a whimsical stop in Las Vegas (117 degrees, but dry!),
wonderful hiking with spectacular views in southwestern Utah,
stops to visit family and friends in Denver and Kansas City (this is my childhood friend, Dan Cannon, from grade school days in Iowa City, IA; we hadn’t seen each other in 35 years!),
a key stop at the Woodford Reserve distillery outside Louisville,
and too much riding in a car.
Thank you to all who have followed along here, I hope you’ll stay with me; more adventures and ruminations to come!
Re-entry to “normal” life after a big adventure is never easy. If the adventure takes place over a long time period, it means it has become a way of life. It has to in order to be successful.
Riding a bike, say, for 6-8 hours a day for 68 days requires that activity to become habit, to be internalized and built in physically, mentally and emotionally. You go to sleep with the next day’s ride on your mind, you wake up with the mindset to execute it, you stretch and slather on sun screen with anticipation for it. You don’t allow yourself to consider not doing it.
After the day’s ride, you assess how it went, any mistakes you made, what you could do better tomorrow. You stretch again, and begin thinking about the next day’s ride. In other words, the ride is on your mind most of the day.
Re-entry requires mentally putting on the brakes, re-ordering priorities, returning to former habits and giving up some of the positive ones you’d acquired on the adventure road.
But there’s a fine line between healthy rest and atrophy. Returning home provides a welcome respite from the strain of daily exertion. The trick is to enable rejuvenation without losing the attributes that were gained from overcoming challenge every day. Give the body and mind rest, but not too much.
Every successful adventure includes a change of perspective. You learn a lot about yourself when you set off into the unknown, push through pain and discomfort, dig deep for energy to continue, and gain distance from the comforts of home.
That perspective is valuable and telling. You discover what parts of your life are most important to you, and which ones are not contributing to your fulfillment. Ideally, you make changes upon your return based on that earned perspective, to accentuate more of what you need for well-being, and minimize or eradicate that which is superfluous.
My xUS bike trip was a great adventure. It included all the components: challenge, danger, triumph, wonder, discovery, fear. But it’s over, and has yielded to the new adventure of making life changes to achieve better balance and happiness.
In some ways, that is even more difficult. It’s what I’ll be working on until my next adventure out there. Not too long.