“What would you do if you were not afraid?”

“What would you do if you were not afraid?”

What would you do if you were not afraid?

Here’s a Ted talk from a lady who quit her teaching job and cycled 17,285 miles from Alaska to Argentina with her family.

Nancy Sathre-Vogel.

Cool.

I’m afraid of a lot, unfortunately.

Mostly afraid of what I think I understand of the “unknown”.

What the heck do I know about the unknown?

Not much….that’s what.

That’s what’s so scary….all the stuff I don’t know about.

It’s too easy to fill in the gaps with bad thoughts and fear.

There is too much “unknown” in my repertoire.

We took a long (long for us) bike ride around the lake yesterday.

It’s about 10 miles or so.

There’s this one stretch where you have to get off the gravel and onto the pavement…..onto the pavement where you cross over a high bridge and then go under a railroad trestle in a blind curve.

It’s a short little section with some potential weirdness from aggressive drivers.

There are a lot of cyclists who use that road….but it’s not really a bicycle friendly road.

Traffic flies on the road….too much and too fast make it scary for a cyclist.

Our little caravan with the two younger children and the two older children…trailers and tagalongs and thrift store bikes…..and Jenny and I…. made it just fine.

Of course, it was Sunday and the traffic was light….but my fears of being crushed in the blind curve with my family didn’t materialize.

Nothing bad happened.

Imagine that.

I guess that’s the beauty of experience.

Maybe if you have enough of it…..real experience with real consequence…you can weigh the good and the bad outcomes….and come to the realization that the bad things that have happened to you are a miniscule portion of a percentage of all the things that went on in your life.

There can be a lot of bad….but the bulk of it is really usually pretty good.

You don’t have to be nervous about everything.

We might even try it again.

What’s that Mark Twain quote?

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

Nancy Sathre-Vogel’s family’s story is a good one.

You can read more about it at her webite….. http://familyonbikes.org/blog/about-2/about/

Here’s a collection of the blog posts about the South America trip they took…..  https://www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/?doc_id=1495

About Peter Rorvig

I'm a non-practicing artist, a mailman, a husband, a father...not listed in order of importance. I believe that things can always get better....and that things are usually better than we think.

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