I rode to work today. The air was as cold this morning, around 2-3°C, as it was on any other winter morning that I thought it too cold to ride to work, or play sport outside. The air yesterday on the ride up to Castle Coch was even colder. And yet with only a pair of skins and a couple of layers on top the rides were fun, life-injecting; not the miserable, bitterly freezing experiences I imagined. Most, if not all things turn out to be so: not as bad, terrible, devastating as how we play them out in our mind before they occur. Keep this in mind the next time you visualise an experience in your head before it happens. And dismiss it, because when you're actually in the moment, it won't feel nearly as bad as what you pictured.
The transition to riding is part of my quest to simplify my life. After reading
Letters From a Stoic recently, the idea to simplify my life was brought back to the forefront of my attention. David Henry Thoreau is cementing the idea in my conscious with passages like this from his book
Walden: Or, Life in the Woods:
“Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”
So I recently bought some wet weather cycling gear to get me through the cold, wet, winter days and this morning I began my journey
toward along a more simple life. A slower, less stressful, more environmentally friendly commute to work. Not nearly as bad as I thought.
