Making plans

“We’re only making plans for Nigel.  We only want what’s best for him.”

I love four day weekends.  It’s a bit like paydays.  Things which were once part of a working life, then for five months of non working were suddenly strange alien concepts.  It’s funny having reverted to a Monday to Friday nine to five with a monthly payday how wonderful these things have suddenly become, and how I feel so giddily thankful for them.  At the same time, though, I am counting down how long I am tied to the desk for.  Two more months and I can get back to where I was, armed with the finance to carry me through another period of simply being.

Having taken five months of doing things differently through September, October, November, December, January it’s odd how little I feel I did.  I’m kind of disappointed in myself; well a little bit.  Five months and all I did was go to France and New Zealand.  Mind you, it is for this cautious unadventurous woman a careful toe in the water to the world of living without the normal formal boundaries and linear normality.  It’s been a little bit about working out for myself step by step what it is I’m happy doing.  

• Am I happy spending tracts of time alone – yes, check.
• Am I confident in being in a foreign country with a language I can’t speak – yes, check.
• Can I live, can I eat, shop, survive? – yes, check
• Can I create careful adventure, navigate, plan, organise, pack – yes, check.
• Am I strong and fit enough to cope? – it does seem so, yes, check.
• Am I practical enough to take to the road with boots a pack and a tent – oh my god yes.
• Do I have the mental strength to go it alone – I feel confident I can and do.  I suspect this one may have been my biggest unvoiced doubt a few months ago.  There have been times when I’m out there with no fall back, no sounding board, nothing but my own decision making.  Each time I do it I feel more sure I can do it.

I feel relieved that the sportive I have entered which was due to happen on 7^th April has been postponed to 21^st April. I now feel it is somehow more achievable - that goal of simply getting round it.  The weekend saw two simply enjoyable rides on the mountain bike.  Oh.  It’s quite funny really; just smiling remembering that I did two rides in the snow and sludge which involved cold and snow drifts and unrideable bits.  

My unthinking happy brain was simply remembering Friday’s smiley incidents of meeting a JCB, or of being told to simply look at and follow a lycra clad bum or standing on the road behind a snow bank which towered way above my head.  The part of my brain which is trying to process things into sentences then remembered the ride involved a top ten Olympic Games mountain bike rider too, and that’s plain plain ludicrous and in some way doesn’t really compute.

The bit of my brain involved with emotion and not fact is also remembering Monday’s ride with interest.  I let myself be angry; a kind of rare emotion for me to indulge in.  It does feel like an indulgence in honesty, something I’m partly afraid of but also something I feel is the ultimate self indulgence.  It’s been an emotion I don’t give into as a rule, more something I remember how to feel and can tap into when I want to, generally for writing.  But Monday I let the emotion in, relaxed into it (oh my word I am incredibly pent up repressed sometimes), and let it grow, and for the first time released it on the bike.  A red hot fiery ball which could have manifested as a stomach ulcer in acid build up instead took me through ice and snow and slush and mud until at last it was kind of done with and I could smile again.  And doing the ride in those mixed moods didn’t make the ride a bad thing; it made it a good thing, mood as mixed as the terrain.  I wouldn’t, though, do it through choice – I’m scared of anger, mostly because it’s something I rarely let break through, and as a result, have no experience or understanding of how to manage it, and I worry it’ll ignite until I become the anger.