As only a day-off on your bike in the woods can bring

Riding three days straight makes me remember how much I love to ride. And how too-busy-to-ride I've been.

Late on Friday afternoon, my head buried in both hands, I made plans, promises to myself really, to go in to work today.  Not because I had to.  I didn't.  But because I needed to, or at least I felt I did.  However, once today arrived, as a crisp clear morning and the first official day of Spring Break 2012, having had two days off to contemplate the massive pile of I-don't-know-what-it-is that's piled on my desk at work, I made the decision to just go ride after breakfast, and think-on-it-all, rather than go into my office and make a feeble attempt to muddle through it all once again.

It was a cop-out, a dodge  I'll admit that.  But a manageable one, I think, in the long run.  This work I have to do right now, which I know will make no one happy, will all eventually get done, one way or another, like it or not.  Has to.  Today, had I gone in, I would have had a chance to, perhaps, make a little headway toward better understanding some of it.  But it probably would have amounted to very little.  Or nothing at all.  Because I don't really understand yet what I have to do and even less about how to do it.

Or maybe I just don't want to.

So I went out and rode. Up the Dogfoods to Newham.  Until the snow finally turned me around.  Made a rock-stack. And sat in the sun.

To think.

I figured nothing out.  Had no epiphanies.  Did imagine myself, briefly, in a time and place where I didn't have to make unpopular decisions about complicated things.  And then I got back on my bike.  Resolved to ride down this hill resplendently splattered with mud, with more than a fair measure of joy in my heart, as only a day-off on your bike in the woods can bring.