Trip Reflections

Final Thoughts on this Trip

My first long-distance bike trips transformed many of my perceptions about people, places, and my place in the world.  Our place of birth, upbringing, and lived experiences inform our perceptions of the world around us.  Given the great diversity in lived experience among all people around the world, no person possesses a complete understanding of their own family or community, let alone a firm grasp on the people and places we are exposed to throughout our lives.  The best we can do is to be open to learning and respecting the people and places we encounter along the way - knowing that our experience is but a single experience in a vast sea of reality.  This is foundational to building a better humanity.

After accepting these terms, perceptions can change.

All travels can be informative if we decide to pay attention.  Indeed, absorbing the world around us is easier when the travel takes some effort.

What appreciation a mountain can obtain only after being climbed.  In the time it takes to ascend to the top, one cannot help but ponder how the substance of the mountain itself became organized in such a way, over a timescale so incomprehensible to human understanding.  Sacrificial sweat falls to the ground only to evaporate into the air that swirls and blows across miles of vast terrain, constantly transforming the landscape as it has over millennia.

The desert ahead, once a liquid ocean of life, still teems with life, though foreign to the human eye.  What is unseen is often passed without consideration.  Few study that which can be passed through so quickly.  On a bike, the rapid pace is replaced with a study of the space.  The noise of the road is a distraction from the destination.  In a car, the noise is but a means to it.

The exercise on a bike tour is not just an exercise in natural science.  Social science lessons abound - again, if we pay attention.

Aggressive and linear, so out of place, the wall, already built, stretches along an arbitrary line through sand and rock.  On either side, faded belongings, once clutched by human hands, children’s hands, show their exposure to harsh conditions.  Remnants of people’s movement, restricted in so many ways, by other people.  I, myself, a person, can, at any moment, withdraw my voluntary attendance in this arena, strewn with white trucks, checkpoints, and warnings.  But others, people too, choose to traverse the expanse out of necessity to seek a life worth living.  A life that I enjoy without the questions, interrogation, or fear of being shipped off like dangerous cargo.  One that I have simply because of where I was born.

When perceptions change, actions do too.  Our incorrect assumptions can become invalidated and, if we are willing, be reshaped.  Isaac Asimov said it best, “Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.”  This opportunity that travel can provide holds much promise in improving humanity.

Many argue about what is good or bad for “our” society.  Many make claims about “what needs to be done” to address this, that, or “them”.  To be better, we need to be willing to be better people.  We can’t look for things in the same places.  We should get our news from our interactions in the world, not from a screen.  We need to scrub off some of those dirty windows we look through.  

For me, I’ll be scrubbing the desert dust off my bike.