I’m home! I pedaled like a boss from the SFO airport with one backpack on my back and another - loaded down with treasures - on my front. As I sit here typing on the floor of my apartment in San Francisco - the city I ostensibly live in - I find myself updating my blog. There are so many things that I could - and will - write about. But in this moment, it feels like the most important thing is to write about the blog itself - why I wrote one, why I stopped writing one for the last week or so. It happens that I have the window open with the original plan for my trip sitting right next to me, and it’s amazing that the trip I planned out turned out both exactly as I had planned, and completely different from what I had imagined. Similarly, I feel in some ways that nothing has changed, and yet in another sense I feel like everything has changed.
But first of all, the blog. First things first: I am not intending on abandoning the blog. For one, it will always be the way that I will keep up with home and others when I’m on road trips, especially athletic ones. Like I mentioned, I’ve started to see my bike trip as a lifelong endeavor, so the blog will be also. But in addition to that, I think I will be blogging from San Francisco as well. Perhaps not quite as often, but whenever I have something interesting to say. When I first started the blog, I had a couple of decisions to make, and one of those was whether the blog would be more about what was happening to me, or more about how I felt about it. That is, was it a travelogue, or a journal. I decided to split the difference, Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance-style, assuming that the events around me would influence my philosophical bent. And that worked out great, so I’ll stick with it, although it may become more philosophical when I’m at home, and more travelogue when I’m, well, traveling.
It’s interesting - to me, anyway - to think about why I stopped blogging for the last week or so. It isn’t, precisely, that nothing interesting or worth writing about has been happening to me. But it’s arguably the case that I just haven’t been in the right frame of mind to be reflective about those things. That is, on the bike, I had a lot of time to really think about thinking - to lead the examined life, as it were. So meaningful thoughts - thoughts I was proud of, and proud to share - bubbled up to the surface. At home with my family, I fell back into a routine. It isn’t precisely that I was too busy, it’s more that I was moving from one task to another without really examining what I was doing or thinking too hard about it from a philosophical point of view. Get up, go to McDonalds, study, chat with Jamie, head home and shower, have lunch with my family, go to the gym, etc., etc.
I don’t know if this is good, or bad, or just *is*. I think I’m inclined for the latter. I do see the danger in being like that all the time - which is how I used to live, and how many people live, simply bouncing from thing to thing, head down all the time. Too much of that seems bad. But I also think that too much introspection can turn into navel-gazing. Freud is erroneously attributed to have said “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” and I would say that sometimes a trip to McDonalds is just a trip to McDonalds, no real larger philosophical purpose. You never know when life will hand you an important lesson. So, in that vein, it seems like forcing myself to blog everyday isn’t the most helpful thing, any more than a strict diet. But if I go too long without blogging, that’s a sign to myself that I’m not stopping to think about life as much as perhaps I should or would like to. As much as I like communicating with everyone, the blog in that sense is really more of a tool for me, to ensure that I’m actually *living* my life, and not just sleepwalking through it.
So to make a short story long - I’m done, and I’m not done. But I’m back!
