This Road I Ride: Sometimes It Takes Losing Everything to Find Yourself

I’m increasingly unable to make small talk, too. After hours of silence on the road, when I finally open my mouth to speak, I now notice how much nonsense comes out. How little of substance is ever said. Everybody talks, but nobody really says anything.

But you know what happens when I’m told I cannot or should not do something. That little voice in my head starts counting down . . .*

If I had waited to achieve a higher level of fitness, to hone my cycling technique and mechanical know-how, to ensure the best weather conditions, to assemble a full support team, to secure a sponsor and more funding, I never would have left. Many people postpone making their dreams a reality to wait for the perfect time. There’s no such thing. The perfect time is right now

I have been listening to a lot of Charles Bukowski over the last week. It was probably his dark, absurdist understanding of human nature that drove him to the bottle, but his dysfunctional genius was pretty spot on a lot of the time. “We’re all going to die, all of us,” he says through my earphones. “What a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.”

Many people have written to compliment me on my strength throughout this endeavor. But I am not strong. I am the furthest thing from strong. I have suffered deep pain. I have lost everything I had and the people I loved most. There have been days when death seemed like a tempting gift and continuing to live the most difficult thing in the world. But I have kept on going because I am stubborn. When the pain becomes too much to bear, when I am too tired to carry on, my tenacity and pride force me onward. Giving up completely would be even harder, because I could never live with myself if I did.

The words “stop” and “go back” work like vinegar on a wound. Anything but that. Going back has never been an option. In the words of Dr. Livingstone, “I will go anywhere, provided it be forward.”

The truth is, from the day we are born, time starts counting down toward that one inevitability. All we ever have is time. Yet even time is an illusion. All that really exists is the eternal present. We can only ever live right now, in this day, this hour, this minute.

Hendri called it “living the best day ever.” It was the guiding philosophy by which he lived his life. Yesterday is always in the past; it no longer exists. Tomorrow has not yet happened, so it does not exist either. Today is the only day we will ever live, and that makes it the best day ever. The sooner we realize this, the sooner we can stop holding on so tightly to what we think we have, stop hoarding in preparation for an elusive future, and start going about the business of living in the present. Because all that exists is now. This moment. This day.

But there are stars—a glorious, infinite firmament of stars. The giant globes of fiery gas that could consume our planet look like tiny glittering specks, so small and distant. I can’t help thinking that we, with our inflated sense of our own importance, are just infinitesimal particles in a giant cosmos, and that the things that occupy our daily lives are meaningless when seen through the lens of eternity. We’re nothing but minute, insignificant organisms who believe we’re the center of the universe. How ridiculous is the human race? How ridiculous am I? We’re insignificant. Cycling around the world, I’m insignificant. The universe was here before, and it will continue long after my brief spell of consciousness.

want to cry and laugh at the same time. After all those years searching for it, deep down I have always known the way back, but it was buried under suffering and sorrow and struggles. Today I have stumbled on it by accident, and now I understand. I don’t need a staircase to reach this place of complete bliss. I can find it anywhere, at any time.

It reminds me of something Joseph Campbell wrote: “Find a place inside where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.”

Today I have found that place.

To me, it has always been a place of unnecessary filth, disease, and ignorance, overwhelming stench, great disparity between the castes, and misogyny that manifests itself most alarmingly in the high rape statistics. A place where human life holds less value than that of cows, which are deified. When people I meet in Europe sigh and use terms such as “deep” and “spiritual” when describing their life-changing journeys through the country, I remain silent. I cannot believe that true spiritual enlightenment would ever include such dismal side-effects.