Life is like a bike ride: sometimes you want to take the back roads and ride slowly, and sometimes you want to ride on expressways just to get someplace else. Sometimes you have a destination in mind, sometimes you just turn down random streets to see where you get taken, sometimes you turn into dead-end streets and have no choice but to turn back. Sometimes you want to go to a peaceful place where you can lie down for a few minutes, and sometimes you just want to feel the wind in your hair. Sometimes you feel it's worth it to ride uphill for a while just to get to that spot, and sometimes you feel tired and only want to stop and get a drink. Sometimes you go through quiet neighborhoods, sometimes on noisy roads with lots of traffic, sometimes through small, deserted roads where you see nobody for a few minutes, and sometimes through places that you've been a thousand times....

While riding, you see familiar places, and sometimes you choose to go through unfamiliar places. Every once in a while, you see something that reminds you of a past memory, or a recent thought you just had which you now dwell on for a few minutes, while only giving as much concentration as needed on the act of biking. Even rarer, you pass by someplace where you've actually been before, and maybe have spent a lot of your life there, and you dwell on that for a few minutes....

Then you suddenly realize that something has been on your back since you last were at this place, and it hits you that it's been at the very back of your mind for all those years, and that it's really not worth carrying around anymore. A grudge, a worry, feelings toward someone... it's all not worth saving, but you've been clinging on to it for no reason at all. You probably can't even remember why you hold this grudge, or why you still hold those feelings....

And that realization makes you ride slowly through this place where you've been before, looking at how it has changed, and how some of it still seems intimately familiar, like you were there yesterday. You look for the person, but she's not there. And you're slightly disappointed, but it feels good to have finally let go of whatever it was....

As you ride back, you think of other things that are bothering you, questions that you still don't have the answer to, other people to whom you need to tell something very important, but you know that you can't. You think of what would have happened if you had said something earlier, when the time was right, or what would've been different if you had made a different decision in the past. You struggle to resolve the questions as easily as you wiped the grudge, the worry from your mind. It felt good to have closure to that one thing, and yet, you cannot possibly get any closure to anything else, no matter how badly you want it....

You think of possibilities, what would work well, what would end badly, what would be best for you, whether to keep quiet, or whether to let it all burst out to whoever it is. You desperately need an answer to the question, but you know that it cannot be asked....

You think about the cemetery that you passed by earlier in the ride, and you realize that you've already been through a big part of your life, and that you cannot waste time dwelling on what would have been, what should have been, what could have been. And even though you realize this, you still cannot accept the fact that you probably will never get an answer....

That epiphany was your destination, with your ride there being the climb towards realization, the ride back being the reflections on that epiphany, and the applications to other things in your life. You're a little wiser for having taken the time out of the day for this bike ride, and you're looking forward to getting home. You turn down a street, you start to ride a little faster, and things are getting very familiar again....


... and as you turn down another street and you're a few minutes away from ending your trip, your tire pops, you get a flat, and you have to walk the rest of the way home.