Vague Idea Racing: Why stand on a silent platform?

Fight the war...

That's what went through my mind anyways.

At the age of fifty five (and a half), if and when I have a quiet moment, I find myself "reflecting." Dealing with certain adult stuff lately that's been emotionally draining has me thinking about where I'm at, where I'm headed, and how I got here. From time to time, I wonder if I shoulda pursued a "career" that uses my brain more. I used to be smart, at least I think I was (despite how I come off here, there, wherever). Grades, college entrance test scores, my initial path once I started my "higher learning"...

I probably coulda been good at something... had I known where to direct my pretty immature young twenty something year old energies.

I still think it's insane that we ask seventeen year old humans, "What do you want to do the rest of your life... keeping in mind that if you choose wrong you could end up in loads of debt and heading in the wrong direction?"

Life happens. I re-meet The Pie in the latter months of my college life. Our two paths became one, I graduate, so does she, and the next thing you know, I'm a bike messenger in Charlotte in 1996.

I'm leaving a lot of blanks to be filled in, but obviously that was never even close to anything like a "plan."

The job really suited me. A constant barrage of new information that had to be sorted in my brain only to be immediately resorted every twenty minutes all while negotiating traffic and other humans in the process of being (in my way). The combination of mental gymnastics and the physicality of the job gave me what I needed, and something that I could walk away from at 5:00PM with pretty much a clean mental slate.

Now that I've been in my current job for seventeen years(?), I still do messenger work, but I spend way more time with "administrative" tasks. I enjoy the problem solving aspects of my job, and I do get to work with some really great people, but...

I need mental stimulation and physical movement to keep my mind sharp and my body communicating with that same aforementioned mind. Sometimes, I want to be everywhere all at once but other times have a singular, intense, all-encompassing focus on what's in front of me.

Thank dog, Western North Carolina trails are back on the menu.

Nothing feeds my brain like bombing down a leaf-covered Trace Ridge at Mach Chicken on a stupid hard tail. I feel like I'm giving in to getting old if my need for speed is not respected in some manner, and since I'm not one to fly down the highway risking tickets and lives, this is about the only thing that fits the bill. It had been almost two and a half months since I'd ridden in the Motherland, and I was a little concerned that mebbe it had been too long.