So much of life is routine, but there are the times when it is not. Like regular clock-work, I take three bikes each week–same days, same route. All year. But on Saturday I rode off into the countryside. It wasn’t a day I normally ride, and it was a route I had never taken before. Twenty-five miles later, with several dirt roads explored, I made my way home.

Adventuring bike rides across the countryside is one of my favorite things to do, but I don’t do it very often. I guess mostly because of the weekly routine–I don’t have three hour chunks of time is lying around waiting for a bike ride. If I go adventuring on back roads something else isn’t getting done, and so the adventures rarely happen. But whenever I do head off for unknown hills and valleys I regret that I don’t do it more often.

The rides give me a quiet peace, and a joy in the natural world that I don’t get in my normal life. And I think it does me good.

I find in the rides a metaphor for life. They are hard (you should see the hills around here) and they require perseverance. I don’t know what is coming around the corner, I don’t know how the road will play out, but I do know the end (home). There are so many interesting things to see, and unexpected beautiful sights. The expanse of the world can be breath-taking, exhilarating. It’s never boring. But it is solitary. It is just me, struggling along, the world sliding by. Occasionally I’ll see someone, maybe there will be a wave, and then they are gone never to meet again.

I guess the rides capture something that I don’t know if I’ve found anything else to capture so well–the experience of aloneness with a faint hint of melancholy held in the perfect balance with the realization that there is more than that–a beauty and grandeur to all that is which says that as alone as we might ever seem we are not so alone as we think we are. And whatever trials we might have, in the sweating and struggling of this moment, there is a radiance that spreads beyond what we can see.

It isn’t the perspective I normally have on life, or my troubles.

And after I finish the ride I can sleep really well too.