Cyn's Thoughts on the Shoulder

People want answers. They're not satisfied with just questions. But sometimes, answers aren't anticipated or constructed, they're arrived at---come upon.

As I sit here on yet another car-length stretch of shoulder on I-40, I can't help but to notice how uncomfortably sticky and dirty my hands are. How my rear is hot in its jeans, how my back aches...

I'm testing my patience. That's what's happening to me---the queen of patience having her patience tested. Like she has to prove something to sombody, probably herself---since she has to maintain the title!

Who'd have thought? I'm squeezed in my chair, legs pressed up against the steering wheel. Waiting.

Patiently.

But there's this disturbance in my thoughts. Something that wants me to do, rather than to wait.

(Here's a funny video I forgot I recorded while waiting for Luna in the Mojave desert! Ha!)



I tried calling my brother and my dad. Something to pass the time. Conveniently, neither of them were there to hear what patient waiting really sounds like... boredom.

I admit it. Today, I'm bored. Thank goodness for NPR! (And yet, one can only get so smart in one day.)

Much of my day is spent looking through the rear-view mirror to see a black speck in the distance.

What are we doing?

What are we headed into?

Why are we doing this again?

My ire swells a little when I realize how hot it is, what time it is, how much my butt aches.

And then I see the black speck.

Maybe he's hungrey. Or maybe he wants to quit---for today, at least. I could handle that. I'm bored.

Day 4 - Cyn's Thoughts in Arizona

This morning, I woke up so thankful for a full night's sleep, into actual morning---the kind that follows a sunrise, not the kind that pursues it, as we have been doing for the first three days of this journey.

Today, even though we're still in desert climes, I'm thankful for the wind, so Luna can pump his legs across Rte. 40 to Flagstaff.

We're both awed by the relentless peace, the beauty of the landscape, and how close the fluffy, white and silver cloud puffs float above the trees. They travel slowly, too. Like us.

There is a certain pace to living, isn't there?

And when we're not in synch with that pace, then we call it life, because we don't really feel like we're living. Seems like we're either rushing to get ready for it, rushing to get ahead of it, or waiting to get ready for it, or waiting because we think we got ahead of it.

Day 4 - Cyn's Thoughts, Waiting on I-40 to Flagstaff

It feels like we've been doing this cross-country journey for weeks now, but it's only been four days.

Indeed, hitting the road has taken an entirely different tone than I originally thought it would. I had page-turning thoughts of Kerouac and Hesse, but instead, there's less anticipation for the future and more of ... just settling into the present moment. (It sounds obvious as an observation to me now, as I write it, but it just wasn't so obvious to me in anticipation of this trip.)

In one of the videos I posted to this blog, I muse that I'm "cool" for a crazy cross-country cyclist like my sweetheart, because I'm like a traveling rest stop.

In our car, I drive the highway for five or 10 miles, and then I wait.

Our white Ford Escape is fully stocked with such foods as bananas, salt, bread, crackers, spaghetti with Nutella, roasted bell peppers and tomato salsa (the latter two made possible by our Gilroy friends.)

This white "bus", as we lovingly call it, also contains bandaids, butt butter and body lotion for all of those emergency body care needs.

So, I'm needed. And it's surprising how much comfort that thought gives me in this big expansive world that we live in.

Perhaps that was the miracle I was supposed to find. (I suspect that even if I do find the miracle, it will somehow elude me as that defining bell rings. But in this moment now, it's kind of nice for me to find some purpose--any purpose--for the right here, right now.)

Ironically, I'm finding my raison d'etre by sitting, in the car, on the shoulder of the highway, in the heat, along a winding ribbon of asphalt.

In short, not "doing" very much at all, but waiting.