It Was Never Meant To Rain

When I came up with the idea of cycle touring New Zealand, I painted a perfect, idyllic picture in my mind.  It was one where I cycled easily and with carefree abandon, along flat roads, lined with beautiful and stunning scenery.  I would meet other cyclists, swap stories and snippets of information.  We'd share some of the road, a coffee or beer, and all the while, overhead, a blue sky and a golden sun.  It was never meant to rain.

Yesterday had been a free day.  I had decided that I wanted to give myself the chance to recover from day one on the road and also to allow my head cold an improved chance of leaving me.  The cold is not heavy by any means, but as I toil up hill, becoming short of breath, I can feel its energy sapping affect.  If I have the next three months on the road, taking one extra day to shift this annoying ailment was surely worthwhile.  I used the day to my advantage, visiting the i-Site (official New Zealand tourist information) and clarifying that the coastal route that I had planned to take was actually not possible, due to the long sections of unsealed road.  The woman at the desk advised me against it.  That means that for now at least, I am stuck with the state highway (SH1N) and the heavy and fast traffic that uses it.  Not ideal at all, but there is no other option, at least not on the section from Warkworth to Wellsford.  At Wellsford, I have an option to take a right turn off the highway and head onto the quieter sealed back roads through to Waipu and beyond to Whangarei, and it is an option I will happily take.

Boats nestled at Sandspit

I spent a few hours in the morning making the short ride out to Matakana, a small village a few kilometres from Warkworth, where I stopped off at the Black Dog Cafe, which was doing a great trade on all of the Sunday day trippers out for a ride.  One coffee later and I headed on over to check out Sandspit, on my loop back to Warkworth.  Sandspit was stunning.  My jaw dropped open on rounding the bend and seeing it for the first time.  Crystal clear water, lined with golden sand beaches and dense, lush, green bush all around.  This moment defined perfectly the reason I chose to come back to New Zealand.  I cycled out onto the spit and marvelled at my surroundings.  I felt alive, at peace, and I felt a giddy sense of happiness that plainly showed, as a beaming smile spread across my face.

900 year old Kauri tree

In the afternoon, I took a short bike ride out to the Warkworth and District Museum, so that I could go and check out the 900 year old Kauri tree that grows there.  Kauri trees are the largest native tree that grow in New Zealand and they were once found in great abundance.  Unfortunately, since the arrival of European settlers in the 19th century, they were felled in great numbers for use as timber in building and ship construction.  Not as large as its North American cousin, the Giant Sequioa, the sight of a Kauri tree still makes an impressive sight in its own right.  I laid a hand on the bark of the trunk and I attempted to listen to its pulse of life, to what it might have to say.  I offered my own thanks to the tree, and gave a thank you to nature also.

There is a free bush walk through the native bush at the museum and I took the opportunity to submerge myself under the canopy of the foliage and into the gloom of cool, dense forest, emerging after some thirty minutes of strolling, back into the bright late afternoon sun.

And so to this morning.  Rising with the alarm, I made good my preparations for departure.  Shower, breakfast, coffee, surf the web, and dress.  I looked out the window to grey skies and they pleased me.  My forearms are still a little sore from the sunburn incurred on my first day on the road, and I was grateful for some cooler temperatures and respite from the blazing sun.  I packed everything away into my panniers before opening the front door of my unit, so that I could wheel out the bike and load it outside.  But what was that I could hear on the corrugated roof of the veranda?  Pitter-patter, pitter-patter.  Much to my horror, I discovered that a light rain was falling.  This was not in the plan.  Certainly not on the day when I was determined to pitch my tent and make camp for the first time.

I went to find Carol and Dave, the British ex-pat couple that managed the motel.  "She's set in for the day", said Dave, "it's the cyclone that been affecting the islands (Pacific islands) and it's coming down from the north.  Supposed to get worse before it gets better."  This was not good.  I looked at the surface of the swimming pool as droplets of rain dive bombed into it, making hundreds of tiny splashes and sending rings racing outwards.  I did not want to spend another day in Warkworth.  Yesterday had already been a luxury and I had only managed one day of cycling, and now here I was, confronted with taking two days off from the road.  This was hardly the glorious start I had imagined.  But I am also a pragmatic person and I knew that to head north from Warkworth would take me into a rural area before I arrived at Whangarei.  Whangarei itself was too far to try, my aim had been to head for the coastal settlement of Waipu, and if I felt up to it, then on as far a Ruakaka.  Each of these places had a campsite I could try for the night.  Away from there, there would be very little in the way of motels and guesthouses, and I was also aware that this was peak holiday season.  Did I want to try to pitch my tent outside for the first time with the threat of a cyclonic weather system on top of me?  Did I want to cycle wet all day, this early in my journey?  No.  No way, no chance, no how.

Perhaps what I discovered today is that I am a comfort adventurer.  I prefer to think of it in those terms, rather than to think that I am a coward, that I don't have the backbone for this adventurous larking about.  I'm here after all, I'm already in an adventure, which ever way I look at it.  Why make it any harder or more difficult than it needs to be, especially so early on?  I figured that there was still plenty of time for hardships on the road, it was just that today did not need to be one.  So, one day of cycling, two days off.  That's a luxury I cannot afford.  Tomorrow, I'm determined to be on the road, I'm going to make that happen.  For now though, I'll take a short stroll down town and find me a nice cafe, where I can sit and read Treasure Island and dream of adventure from the comfort of a snug armchair.

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Knowing The Path

Today, I experienced a moment of epiphany.  These moments never quite occur to you where you might believe.  My moment did not come as I stared out across the vast expanse of the ocean, nor did it arrive as I gazed up to the stars of the heavens, there were no snow-capped mountains in view, no deep lush jungle stretching off into the distance, there was no tumbling cascade of a waterfall.  Instead, it came to me as I stood in my kitchen and I poured out my ritual after dinner coffee.  So, just what was this moment of deep realisation about my life, that refused to contain itself, and that rushed at me, before I was able to add the milk to my cup?

There will always come moments when the light shines forth from within.  These times occur when we are most deeply connected with our hearts, when we are in synchronised rhythm, heart and soul as one.  I've experienced moments of epiphany before and I've written about them previously - standing in the middle of a square in Budapest, sitting on the wall at the waterfront in Wellington.  They never come when we expect them, they arrive unbidden, a moment when it feels as though lightning has struck you, or someone has turned on a light in a darkened room.  I know these moments because when they dawn on me, I cannot stop myself from smiling with a deep sense of pleasure and joy, I want to laugh, to shout and to sing out loud.  This can only come from the knowledge that the thought that is now in your head, originated in your heart, that the thought is the very essence of who you are, who you are meant to be.  That thought is you.

For many years of my life, I was in denial of who I was, who I was born to be.  I was not myself.  I was an imposter, or rather, the imposter was me.  I acted out the life of another person because that is what I thought I should do.  I was a good actor because I fooled many people, I fooled myself.  I could not admit to myself the very thing that it was that I wanted the most in life.  Why?  Simply because I was afraid of what it would mean to me, I was frightened of the consequences.  I lived a life where on the surface at least, I appeared to be happy, but underneath, I never truly was.  My true self was buried deeply within me, covered over, so that it was carefully hidden away, lest it should escape.

I could not have been more wrong.  The journey of my life, the story of my life, is essentially one of discovery.  It seems to me that life had a plan and it was not going to let me go quietly away.  Through so many seemingly random events, meetings and happenings, life found me, it caught me in its grip and it would not let me go.  Life reached through to my inner being, it touched my heart, and it rekindled my desires and my passions.  No, not rekindled, since it implies that once there was a fire and I do not recall there ever being a fire in my soul before life took hold.  But once it did, I was like a piece of driftwood, caught up in the current of a river and unable to reach the shore.  I had to go wherever the water of life took me.  Everything that happened to me, the good and the bad, became necessary parts of my journey, shaping me, helping me to learn, to grow, and to evolve my soul.  This river brought me to a place in my life where I was finally ready to admit to myself who I really was, and to become the man I had been born to be. 

Since this time, I have lived my life as deliberately as possible.  As Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden; or, Life In The Woods, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life..."  I have made decisions to do those things that I wished to do, no matter how ridiculous or foolish they might seem.  My journey has taken me around the world, I have been a backpacker, a dive master, a full time student, a project administrator, a charity street funds collector, and a diving instructor.  I have lived for a time in Malaysia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada and Costa Rica.  I have visited and had short stays in many countries in between.  I have experienced things I never dreamed were possible.  And I have met many wonderful people.  All of this was possible because of one thing: I dared to try.

Back to now.  Nearly eight years since my true journey began, I have found myself wondering what I should do next.  I know full well that I cannot do what I do forever, that the physical nature of the work will take its toll on my body.  I have been giving thought to the need for a retirement plan and a pension, that I will need healthcare in the coming years, that really and truly, I have had a lot of fun and that perhaps finally, it is time to stop and to go and do something far more sensible.  With that in my mind, I have begun to think seriously about becoming a school teacher.  It is something that I believe I would be good at, since I love passing on my knowledge and helping others to learn and to grow.  I have even been complimented on my patience, care and teaching skills.  It seems to be a good fit, a way of returning to normality, of a secure future with a steady income.  But something just hasn't felt right.  As much as I believe I would make a good teacher, the thought of it has not fired me with enthusiasm, the way that I fire up when I talk of scuba diving, the ocean, care for the environment, or travel.  I have been puzzling over why not, when teaching would appear to make so much sense?

This evening, as I stood at my kitchen counter, coffee slowly filling my cup, my moment of epiphany arrived.  In that moment, I knew the path of my life and I knew why teaching is not right for me at this time.  More than this though, this thought that came to me hit me hard, and I smiled because here at last was the truth.  Life is short.  Our time on this planet is but a fleeting moment in which to make our mark and to leave behind our legacy.  There are things that I want in my life: a wife, children, dogs, cats, a family.  Right now, I do not have them.  Why do I want to return to the lifestyle I had before, where I was conforming to what society expected of me, when it went against my true self?  I know that it will make me unhappy.  It will slowly but surely tear my soul apart and it will destroy me.  All that I have learned will be lost, forgotten, and things will be just as they once were, before I began.  I cannot let that happen.  I will not let that happen.

There will come a time when I must forsake this particular part of my journey.  This I know to be true.  That time will come when I have need to take care of something more than myself, when my purpose in life shifts to the provision and care of others - my wife and my children.  Until that time, I am going to go on doing what I have been doing.  I am going to see the world, to travel, to enjoy new experiences, meet new people.  I am going to continue to take a chance on life because I do not know when my last day will come.  I am going to have an adventure.

Thinking of this makes me happy.  Knowing why I have struggled over the last months to understand my direction in life brings me great comfort.  I am still going in the right direction.  Life it seems, is not yet done with me, nor I with it.  The road less travelled beckons to me still.  My heart is singing right now, it is joyful, hopeful and it is ready to go on again.  One day, my heart will be joined by another and when it is, we will journey together, we will make our adventures to share with our children.  And at the moment that she enters my life, those two hearts that have beaten for so long in separate rhythms, will beat to the same tune.  There will always be two hearts, but from that moment on, there will be only one soul.

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