The ride.

I started writing this post quite awhile ago. I left it unfinished, then came back and finished it, and then didn't like it, so I just left it. Well, I'm sick and tired of looking at it labeled as a draft. It was either post it or delete it, and since I don't delete anything...

I find that a bike ride can be a useful analogy for life. (Yes, there are myriad of others, but I'm familiar with this one, so humor me.) Here you are, traveling down a road with lots of twists and turns, potential dangers heightening your sense of awareness, mixed with immense joy, beauty, and the thrill of new experience. Discovering and navigating new roads that will ultimately take you to the same predetermined, and anticipated, destination. There are some bumps, sometimes rain, or other technical difficulties but we persevere, (it's all part of the adventure) ever mindful of our goal.
Yet, once that destination is reached, as rewarding as it may be, there is an overwhelming sense of melancholy; the end of a good ride. The smells, the sounds, the sights, the invigorating feelings of power, freedom and control, finished. The satisfaction of having had a wonderful experience, mixed with sorrow at the knowledge that the experience is over now. Yearning for it to continue, but knowing that it can't, we begin to make ourselves feel safe in the knowledge that there is always tomorrow and we can do it again.

But there isn't always a tomorrow, is there?

We placate ourselves with a false hope that opportunities missed can always be made up for later, or good experiences re-experienced at some time in the future, comfortable in our perceived sense of immortality, and even if we don't get around to it that's okay because some all powerful imaginary being deems it so, and will make it up to us later. By not acknowledging our mortality we are short changing ourselves in life, and if we hold fast to a belief that there is a next life, and that it will be better than this one is, are we not then anticipating death? Religion is the greatest bullshit story we have ever thrust upon ourselves as a species. It actually causes some people to look forward to dying (to ignore their natural instinct) because when they do, they think they will go to a "better" place. A brilliant stratagem for relieving the fear of death. Too bad it's all bullshit.
We waste all kinds of time here with banal, worthless actions that amount to nothing more than time wasted doing something, because; "when we're done wasting all this time, our creator is going to give us the life he wasn't willing to give us in the first place."
The grass is always greener on the other side... isn't it?


So, what is more important; the quality of the trip or the value of the destination? I guess it depends on your mode of transportation. In life, we all have one ultimate destination. Death. Since I don't see any realistic way of improving the value of such a reward, I've decided to put more focus on improving the quality of the ride. Death is a part of life. It needs to be accepted as such so that we can be properly motivated and endeavor to improve the ride because, in the end, the ride is all that we really have.

I know that none of this is new, it's just how I'm feeling right now. I once heard a man say, "It's not that life is so short; it's just that death is so long." and that quote has been ringing in my head a lot recently.