Balance

I can't breathe some days. Can't fall asleep some nights, or it's with struggle, though I am exhausted and could fall asleep standing up.

It's the mind that controls the body. The mind that wants to keep running to find answers on paths for some peace but the body is weak and knows when to rest. They're an odd couple- the mind and the body. They balance one another out rather well.

On the nights when I can barely stay awake driving home and know I will not be able to fall asleep laying down, I take out my motorcycle. Then I am awake. I am alive and my mind can run down whatever paths it pleases, uninterrupted, and free.

We have untapped reservoirs of potential if we know how to use our minds. It feeds off of pleasures and failures both. When I am exhausted and mentally drained, the pleasure of a ride awakens it. When I fail and am near or in tears, I muster the strength to handle it and consider how to avoid feeling miserable ever again. Both, of course, end and lead to other pleasures and failures but they are both necessity. When I cannot focus and am sore at the gym, if we learn a new throw I love, my body and my mind feel refreshed. If it is difficult to learn or there is a struggle, I am exhausted and must focus on technique because, well, technique is best performed and learned when the body is already failing to reinforce good habits.

A long time ago now, the first time I went to Tanzania, my friend Laura and I were chatting in the jumba (large grass hut classroom) and she and I were talking about balance. I remember I said I didn't think there was such a thing and she was intrigued. Laura's so open minded and chill I'm not sure how far this really went with her, but it stuck with me and I've gone back and forth and my mind is unchanged. It's less amorphous now, but the only balance there is is how sometimes things are bad and sometimes things are good and sometimes you have too much and sometimes not enough. That is all. You'll never find perfect balance and nothing will ever be finished. We live in an entropic world that is never going to find balance. It makes life bearable really, because who would ever be satisfied with perfection?

Riding One AM

The air slides by cooly and we're alone on the street. Single lamp posts alight the curve in the suburban half-dark night. I lean in and feed the hunger of the curve almost too perfectly. The kind of perfection where you hit the note before croaking; are one with the other rowers in the boat for a precious stroke of singularity of the physical and mental before a slight shift in everyone that leaves each one struggling towards that next perfect stroke. 

But that one curve-

It was perfect. I glided around the curve and the curve was satisfied for no one had ever ridden it so before. There's no way. It was serendipitous. 

Jon, a seasoned rider, slid around with as much finesse and we rode until almost 2AM. The city was mostly asleep freeing the lights and us to ride largely uninhibited after a long week of work. Jon's my financial guru who's become more like a brother. You can't go wrong with a man who has his own money in order, two motorcycles, tattoos, and a dog. He also shoots it straight and doesn't bullshit around so we get along like cheese and macaroni. 

-

I can't sleep right away some nights, or my mind is racing and it takes me five minutes for sleep to claim me instead of one. Most days I'm awake now by 6:30AM, scooting for work by 7 and will be either at work until late that night or out at the gym training. Eighteen hour days, some with sixteen of those being work that don't include the work I do towards a personal business venture. Other days are less hours at a physical job but include a barrage of e-mails, errands, and commitments to family or work-related that take up any free time. 

Amid the laundry haphazardly folded and shoved into drawers, the gym bag with half-dried shin guards and soaked spats and shirts, I find a few moments of the week that I can slip out with nothing but my license and a twenty in the left pocket of my jeans. Twenty bucks will get you pretty much anywhere close enough to being closer to your wallet or real help again, I figure. 

-

It seems the older we get, the necessity that we find things we love to do and actually do them becomes exponentially more important. When you're young, you don't know much and everything is new but gradually you notice patterns and learn the way of the world and how nothing every really changes throughout time except no one person is the same. That's very important. "It is very important that you do what you love to do," said Elisabeth Kubler- Ross. She studied ill and dying people for a long time and determined basically it's a waste if we live our lives to please others. Not that we shouldn't please others or seek to make others happy, but that what we do isn't to satiate something in another person because if they're giving you that feeling, they're likely doing the same thing with someone else. Maybe it's a dad, like it is for me, or your mom or older sibling. It's just a real shame to not be yourself. What if you miss that moment on the curve?