I was about two weeks away from finishing a four-month tour on my recumbent tricycle. It was a heavy-duty touring machine, with a trailer, and I'd equipped it with solar panels to run my laptop, charge my cellphone, and keep my GPS going. I left from Yorktown, Virginia on May 25, 2006, and pedaled into Santa Barbara, California on September 17. Which isn't quite as impressive as it sounds--I bailed on the whole Pedal Across America thing in the middle of Kentucky and drove to Astoria Oregon, then pedaled down the coast--but it remains one of the great adventures of my life. At some point I'll be doing it again, too--better prepared, and from west to east, and with more determination to do the whole coast-to-coast journey.This particular day in 2006--September fourth--was my last day in San Francisco, hanging out with Doug Heinz and crew before pedaling on south. I had spent 10 days in the city, along with a couple of British traveling companions that I'd met up with in Oregon, and at the time I was planning on moving back there once I'd reached my end point in Santa Barbara.
But plans have a way of changing, don't they? And for the best, sometimes. If I'd been in San Francisco, it's likely that I would have gotten caught up in the economic bloodbath of 2008. And, as it turns out, my mother's declining health means that it's a good thing that I'm nearby. So I'm gainfully employed and able to take care of my family, and all sorts of minor things have lined up in an entirely unplanned yet suspiciously orderly way to put me exactly where I need to be.
This long thread of consequence reaches all the way back to September 11, 2001. If not for the events of that day, I wouldn't have left the city and bought a house in the Lower Hudson Valley, and if I hadn't done that, I probably wouldn't have ever left on my cross-country cycling trip, and if that hadn't happened, it's very likely that I wouldn't have ended up here in Santa Barbara.
Of course, you can play these sorts of games all day and go all the way back to the providential formation of a certain organic molecule in a puddle of ancient goo, but in the frame of reference that is my life, there are a few glaring fulcrums of circumstance upon which I've managed to leverage great changes. The task now, I think, is to recognize such fulcrums for what they are and use them deliberately, instead of being tossed from one track of life to another, seemingly by happenstance.
This isn't to say that I've had no control over my life--far from it; my decision to go on my cycling tour was made with full knowledge that it was going to do something to my life, I just didn't know what. We can never predict the outcome of such leaps, but if we don't put ourselves in the position to make them, we'll walk a straight and level path, to be sure...and we'll never know the risks of flight.
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