Every day is another day in your life and one to be lived, restricted or otherwise. Each walk and cycle ride I do shows me the wonders of nature: different birds chirping their songs on every occasion. Different animals appear in places where they weren't yesterday. Different trees blossom ever-greener in the spring sunshine. Everything changes, even the sheep sitting, lying, running towards me in the hope I might be there to feed them. Nothing is ever the same twice.
We have been given a golden opportunity to slow our lives, step from the gravy train for a while and to see what surrounds us. This is our chance to notice what is really important to us? Perhaps it isn't those shoes that cost hundreds of pounds, nor that shiny, fast car after all. Just maybe, it's the joy of being able to enjoy our immediate world for what it really is and to learn why we need to take care of it beyond surrounding ourselves with consumables and experiences that are bought and sold at the cost of our planets own health.
There's a gentleness in the air again. An overriding sense of quiet peacefulness. Others reiterate this to me. It's a sense I only usually feel in wild places and mountains. Is that because in those places I take the time to notice? Places with little human occupation have always drawn me to them. How often do we get the chance to just sit and be amongst all of this beauty and quiet and why do we find it so difficult to be still? Our world had become one of incessant noise, a constant barrage of sound, doing and achievement. If you don't have a major challenge going on, what's wrong with you? We have created a world where we have grown to hardly notice anything at all other than what we desire from it. Now it's gone, at least in the short term. Our world is speaking to us. Will we listen?
As I've aged I've watched successive generations work longer and longer hours, often for less and less money. Our downtime is such that many feel the need to fill it with personal challenges and tasks that leave us little time for thought and contemplation. I used to be one of those people myself but my mind and body (thankfully) stopped me in my tracks and demanded something different from me.
Without the choice but to listen I set off along a very different path. It still had some big physical and mental challenges but it lacks the old intensity that threatened to burn me out completely unless I changed. That intensity blinkered me to everything else in a single-minded haze and was slowly replaced with an quiet understanding that I wouldn't swap what I had, ill health or not, for anything. I loved my years climbing rock and flying paragliders. I got to do what only a few did back then and I treasure those memories and the people I created them with. Now I have a greater inner peace, an acceptance that I'm happy with what I already have, no longer chasing life but enjoying it.
Without the choice but to listen I set off along a very different path. It still had some big physical and mental challenges but it lacks the old intensity that threatened to burn me out completely unless I changed. That intensity blinkered me to everything else in a single-minded haze and was slowly replaced with an quiet understanding that I wouldn't swap what I had, ill health or not, for anything. I loved my years climbing rock and flying paragliders. I got to do what only a few did back then and I treasure those memories and the people I created them with. Now I have a greater inner peace, an acceptance that I'm happy with what I already have, no longer chasing life but enjoying it.
Where there was speed and strength I have now found more calm and thoughtfulness. Where I was head down and pushing as hard as I could I'm now glad to be out enjoying simply being amongst the countryside, feeling it. It's all a matter of pace and it took me decades to realise that patience is the virtue some have always claimed it is. Like so many young people, I was in a hurry without knowing where I was heading.
I'm as happy cycling ten miles now as I am if I'm out all day long. I'm ecstatic when I see a child I have taught to ride a bicycle pedal away from me to begin their own two- wheeled adventures. I smile as I watch their little legs spinning around furiously as they grin like maniacs, something all cyclists understand and remember and I feel a warmth in the knowledge that I have taught them a life-skill they will have forever.
This moment of world crisis has given them and us the chance to ride outside with hardly a threat from vehicles at all. It's an opportunity to ride on the road with their parents, practise their skills we taught them in relative safety and prepare for a lifetime of virtually free fun and exploring. I wonder how many are actually doing this, how many have even thought along these lines?
And that is possibly a problem. We've been sold the notion that this virus and lock-down is a terrible thing, which to some extent it is. But there is always an opportunity in everything, either to be something different or to change our viewpoint and see things differently. Opportunities come and go but you have to sometimes grab one, hold it up to the light and get under its skin. In a world where many people seem afraid of going outside we seem to be rearing generations of children whose natural inquisitive nature is being ground away in readiness for something much more mundane than developing and exploring their imaginings, their own personal notions of our what life is and how it could be. Are we stealing their dreams blinkering them to what's beyond a computer screen?
As far as I can tell, social distancing is what has been happening since the advent of the World Wide Web. People getting up in the morning, steeping out to travel to work by car or train (another box), not speaking, locked in their own thoughts. And if you dare to speak to somebody you are often met with disdain. It just isn't done. You then work all day long and return home in the same manner only feeling more exhausted. Is this the future we want for the worlds children?
The things we label as leisure activities are perhaps those very same things that give us quality of life. I learned by accident how little money I can live on and how much I could still do despite that fact. Forced into a corner, partly of my own making, I had little choice and that was a life lesson I'm glad I was taught. Forced to look at what I really value, I found travel in my own country and under my own power was liberating and freeing in a way I had perhaps forgotten. I rediscovered that my freedom to move around is the most important asset I have in my armoury. Without that freedom we have nothing.
Now here we are. Freedom curtailed, feathers clipped. Our collective restlessness, for that is what I think it is, has seen us travel further and further for shorter periods of time as we try to make sense of life and justify the way we live. You have to travel to far flung places and I feel it's too easy and too cheap by far. Should it not reflect the cost to the planet to jump on a plane and head off somewhere exotic? We even have a name for it: Wanderlust, the desire to travel constantly, see new things and experience new cultures. Travel undoubtedly broadens the mind, but a weekend getting drunk in Barcelona or Praha, does that qualify? How about two weeks in a rich haven where every whim is catered for (and included in the price) on a beautiful island in the Pacific or Caribbean? Do those who choose that really get a cultural experience, or do they simply destroy and consume the very beauty they go to see through mass consumerism? I'm not judging, just asking if our planet can sustain this level of mass travel.
We go further because we can. Air travel is easy, cheap and quick. It takes little effort outside of choosing a destination, pressing a button on a keyboard and travelling to an airport. A couple of hours later you can be anywhere in Europe, almost. Sit back, relax (if you can!) and bingo, you get a magic carpet ride to take you thousands of miles away for your two week summer vacation. But should we do that? It'd not a question I can answer, other than for myself.
Now we can't do that I'm seeing more and more posts about how wonderful it is to pedal on quiet roads, he kind I remember riding on as a child. Many of those people are asking whether we could stay like this, make a choice to travel less. I ask you, could we?
Until next time...................
As far as I can tell, social distancing is what has been happening since the advent of the World Wide Web. People getting up in the morning, steeping out to travel to work by car or train (another box), not speaking, locked in their own thoughts. And if you dare to speak to somebody you are often met with disdain. It just isn't done. You then work all day long and return home in the same manner only feeling more exhausted. Is this the future we want for the worlds children?
The things we label as leisure activities are perhaps those very same things that give us quality of life. I learned by accident how little money I can live on and how much I could still do despite that fact. Forced into a corner, partly of my own making, I had little choice and that was a life lesson I'm glad I was taught. Forced to look at what I really value, I found travel in my own country and under my own power was liberating and freeing in a way I had perhaps forgotten. I rediscovered that my freedom to move around is the most important asset I have in my armoury. Without that freedom we have nothing.
Now here we are. Freedom curtailed, feathers clipped. Our collective restlessness, for that is what I think it is, has seen us travel further and further for shorter periods of time as we try to make sense of life and justify the way we live. You have to travel to far flung places and I feel it's too easy and too cheap by far. Should it not reflect the cost to the planet to jump on a plane and head off somewhere exotic? We even have a name for it: Wanderlust, the desire to travel constantly, see new things and experience new cultures. Travel undoubtedly broadens the mind, but a weekend getting drunk in Barcelona or Praha, does that qualify? How about two weeks in a rich haven where every whim is catered for (and included in the price) on a beautiful island in the Pacific or Caribbean? Do those who choose that really get a cultural experience, or do they simply destroy and consume the very beauty they go to see through mass consumerism? I'm not judging, just asking if our planet can sustain this level of mass travel.
We go further because we can. Air travel is easy, cheap and quick. It takes little effort outside of choosing a destination, pressing a button on a keyboard and travelling to an airport. A couple of hours later you can be anywhere in Europe, almost. Sit back, relax (if you can!) and bingo, you get a magic carpet ride to take you thousands of miles away for your two week summer vacation. But should we do that? It'd not a question I can answer, other than for myself.
Now we can't do that I'm seeing more and more posts about how wonderful it is to pedal on quiet roads, he kind I remember riding on as a child. Many of those people are asking whether we could stay like this, make a choice to travel less. I ask you, could we?
Until next time...................
