We have been crossing Colorado and Wyoming at a frantic pace this week. Frantic in a bicycle sense, not a car/motorcycle sense. The Rocky Mountains are serious climbs and descents, and I have a burnt all my available energies this week, making my way up and down these monsters. I think I could go to bed at 7 pm each day! Of course the schedule does not allow for that, and so I have to stay up late each night and get up early each morning.
Because of all that is going on in my life right now, the beautiful fatigue I have each day is perfect. It keeps me level and balanced and just tired enough that I don't join in every fight/conversation/discussion/argument I am invited to attend. However it has a downside, in that I don't have nearly enough bandwidth to emotionally navigate all the relationships in my life, especially the ones that surround me on this adult camping trip known as The Fuller Bicycle Adventure. I am discovering that when in such a state, that I don't have nearly as much patience or tolerance or longsuffering as I normally experience in my life. I have less willingness to allow others to dominate, or win, or perhaps rather it's a super sensitivity to the finely-tuned abuses of leadership, or position or power. In other words, long story short, I am that curmudgeon that I always suspected that I was. No one is less surprised than I am.
The reality that I take away from this, is that much of what I do and say and my public persona is relatively shallow and skin deep. Those important characteristics and core virtues are not nearly as foundational nor deeply embedded as I would like them to be. I have a great deal of work and restructuring to do still . . . yet knowing these deficits is at least half the battle, and perhaps the most necessary starting point. Your can't change what you don't know for sure needs changing. You can't address that which you are not convinced needs improvement. So the exploding awareness that I still have quite a ways to grow, is a gigantic step in the right direction. This is the up and down of the real monster.
