Kant, Locke, Nietzsche, …King
That’s right amigos, it’s time to get philosophical. I’m now nearly three weeks out from the broken tibia and life appears goes on. In that period of time I’ve concluded that it’s nearly impossible to have a concrete plan for one’s life. Actually, scrub that; I should say it’s nearly impossible to have one’s concrete plans always come to fruition. Take for example my experience in Australia: my plan was to finish stage one, next finish the week long race, then travel to New Zealand for a few more races, thus returning back to the United States on November 12th. Clearly my plan did not culminate the way I would have expected as I returned home just one week after the original departure date. It’s cliché, but life takes some unexpected twists and turns – some for the better and others not so much – and there’s only so much that one can do to affect these changes. Please understand that my Australian experience itself isn’t something that I want to dwell on, despite being the subject of three consecutive blog entries. Instead, I want it to be educational. For me, this incident gave me the opportunity to put things into perspective. Picture, if you will, everyone’s lives as a deck of cards. My particular deck has been tossed into the air and landed all scattered about – some up, others down, and pretty much all over the place and completely out of order. I know full well that I can’t ride a bike for all eternity, and that there’ll come a point when I have to move onto what some people call a “real” job (if those people only knew how much goes into being a professional cyclist… however, we’ll leave that for another day). For years I’ve thought about what I want to do in life (that is, post cycling career), and for one reason or another, lying in my hospital bed in Australia allowed me to really collect my cards, so to speak, and organize them in a respectable semblance of order. That is, I’ve laid out a basic plan for what I’d like to do when my body and mind tell me it’s time to hang up the bike.* I’ll leave you pondering what it’ll be, because I know you’re all gripped with this particular blog entry and sitting intently on the end of your seats wondering what’s next. Time will tell. After all, no one knows how much of this particular plan will actually materialize…
Subject numero dos: If you’re wondering why the heck there’s an advertising billboard at the top of the screen, it’s part of Google’s plan to take over the world… and I’m a willing participant! For everyone who clicks on the advertisement, I get some to-be-determined-type of payment. I’m not allowed to tell you to click on it and I can’t click on it myself. So that’s that.
* As mentioned above, things fall into perspective when one has dodged a serious bullet concerning one’s well-being. Example: crashing a bike really hard. That said, I love my current career, I love most things bike-related, and I don’t have any immediate plans to retire.
I'll leave you with a picture of my recent drive to Vermont. What a beautiful state.
Adios.