Hi everyone! We’re back from the planned motorcycle ride and I have a confession to make – I wasn’t a natural. I did okay with learning how to move my body in the turns and be a decent passenger, but I didn’t really relax into the experience well. We spent two days on the road with me mostly counting the miles until we got to whatever our next destination was.
As we got on the road this morning for what was going to be our longest day by far – seven hours! – I was really nervous. I wasn’t sure how well I would withstand that much time – after all, my butt started complaining after only about 45 minutes! I was more scared than I’d care to admit, not least of all because I was afraid that seven hours with no one to talk to would be incredibly boring.
And then something remarkable happened – as we rode past some more scrub brush and open fields, Evie popped into my mind. (For those of you who are new readers, Evie is a dear friend who was killed a couple of months ago – you can read more here.) I realized with a flash of stunning clarity that if Evie had been on this trip, she would have been loving every moment of scrub brush and every grain of sand. She would have made a five hour trip into a twelve hour trip by stopping and taking pictures of every interesting plant, window shopping in every interesting store, and eating at every bakery. When the scenery was less than interesting, she would have fixed her attention on the beauty of the sameness.
Evie would have loved EVERY MINUTE of the trip that we were taking. In a flash I realized how much of this trip I had wasted by being scared and trying to control my experience.
Finally this morning I relaxed and started really enjoying the feeling of being out on the road and watching the scenery. Even the scrub brush and endless hay fields. Which quickly gave way to stunningly beautiful mountains and later into amazing red rock formations (pictures to come when I return to my own computer).
It was an amazing day. And I would have missed it if I hadn’t started asking myself – what would Evie do?
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