Where reading and writing and it all goes wrong is in the sitting. So when it feels very wrong you get up and you take trips. But trips go wrong too when they are scheduled, and they are scheduled because you have committed yourself to returning to sitting. So you do something entirely different.
You make a trip without a schedule and you have no plans to return to any sitting. There will be no more reading and writing or any of the other stuff and it is hard at first to think that those things will be gone and as the date approaches that you will leave you wonder if maybe you were wrong to decide to go on a trip without a schedule, a trip without an end. When again would the sitting come? When will the important writing be completed?
But then the trip starts, and it is a trip by bicycle, and it starts in the rain and at a high altitude and you have only a very poor map and a child’s vocabulary with which to speak to the people of a foreign place.
When you see the mountains from the airplane window they scare you, they scare the sitting and the writing and reading all away. You forget those things because you must ride a bike over these mountains. Something now is taking you forward and you must abide by it.
You put your bicycle together in the airport and you ride out into the night. The next day you ride up 2 mountains in the rain and into the clouds and the man who contributed the bike for you to ride has his wish of great suffering for you fulfilled. The contributor of the bike said that you would endure great pain and great suffering and now you are enduring them, but the cold and rain and the altitude forced upon you are greater than the wish of suffering you thought you had received. But you cannot stop to sit.
The suffering you endure and will endure is what you must ride into. The mountain is in your way and you must go over it on the bicycle. The suffering of the stomach and intestines will come later and so will the gales of the Patagone. The sufferings are all there waiting and your bicycle is riding towards them. You are being pulled along and it is a very different “being pulled along” than what the others are doing in their jobs and careers and marriages and families--because this is a “being pulled along” that you have created for yourself and committed yourself to and now it is done.
You start with a bad map and child’s vocabulary and the strength for 2 mountains and maybe you will die and the bicycle will stop and everyone will cry and then everyone will forget. But there is also the chance that you will endure through all the sufferings and finish the map, and you will depart from this place with the vocabulary of a man and a strength for all the mountains.
But then the trip starts, and it is a trip by bicycle, and it starts in the rain and at a high altitude and you have only a very poor map and a child’s vocabulary with which to speak to the people of a foreign place.
When you see the mountains from the airplane window they scare you, they scare the sitting and the writing and reading all away. You forget those things because you must ride a bike over these mountains. Something now is taking you forward and you must abide by it.
You put your bicycle together in the airport and you ride out into the night. The next day you ride up 2 mountains in the rain and into the clouds and the man who contributed the bike for you to ride has his wish of great suffering for you fulfilled. The contributor of the bike said that you would endure great pain and great suffering and now you are enduring them, but the cold and rain and the altitude forced upon you are greater than the wish of suffering you thought you had received. But you cannot stop to sit.
The suffering you endure and will endure is what you must ride into. The mountain is in your way and you must go over it on the bicycle. The suffering of the stomach and intestines will come later and so will the gales of the Patagone. The sufferings are all there waiting and your bicycle is riding towards them. You are being pulled along and it is a very different “being pulled along” than what the others are doing in their jobs and careers and marriages and families--because this is a “being pulled along” that you have created for yourself and committed yourself to and now it is done.
You start with a bad map and child’s vocabulary and the strength for 2 mountains and maybe you will die and the bicycle will stop and everyone will cry and then everyone will forget. But there is also the chance that you will endure through all the sufferings and finish the map, and you will depart from this place with the vocabulary of a man and a strength for all the mountains.
For you and your journey, I will commit to rid my own life of sitting. I will long for my own gales and problems inside my body or mind and for weakness and for inability to communicate, and for seconds and minutes and hours where there is only pain and no ease at all.
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