Life Lessons From a 7-Thousand-Mile Bike Ride | Short Film Showcase
[Music]
I've met a lot of older people: grandparents, teachers, who give me the spiel of, "My life went by so fast. Just yesterday I was 19 or 25, and now I don't know where all that time went. I just blinked and I was 80."
And I think about that, and I'm like, "What a strange way to be alive!" Back in California, I had this fear of building this routine in my 30s, and suddenly the decade is gone. So, I promised myself I would do something radically different. I'm gonna do something that scares the crap out of me and see if that changes my brain chemistry.
[Music]
I've been living on my bicycle for a year now: bikes from Oregon down America, down Mexico, Central America, and into South America. People ask me, "Why do you live on a bike? Why did you quit your job? Why are you doing this?" My answer is this: the routine is the enemy. It makes it fly by.
When you're a kid, everything is astonishing; everything is new. So, your brain is awake and turned on. Every passing second, your brain is learning something new, learning how the world works. The muscle of your brain is activated. As you get older and your brain has figured out the patterns of the way the world works—this is how you make money, this is how you graduate school, this is how you get a mortgage, this is how you have kids—I’ve got that on lockdown. I know my car, and I’m gonna go to work every day, and I’m gonna check out all these things.
Once your brain establishes a routine, it stops. The alertness goes away, the fascination with the way the world works. I think that’s what travel, in general, does—it wakes up your brain. I’ll go into a new country, from Panama to Colombia. These countries, I’m like scared because I’ll find it beautiful and shocking. Every hill I cross over is insanely awesome. My brain is fascinated. I didn’t know my brain could be so tuning.
I want to be aware of every day I’m alive, and I want to make it to 85 and be exhausted because I have been alive and awake every single day. I think that’s the duty of being an adult. When you’re a kid, everything’s new, so you don’t have to work for it; you’re just in astonishment. Once you’re an adult, that’s a choice. You choose adventure for your own.
But it’s not about the bike; it’s about getting out of your routine to look like anything.
[Music]
That’s what I’m doing here—that’s why I’m doing this bike trip. Because I don’t want my days to control me. I don’t want my life, the calendar, to be my boss. I want to control my day. I want to choose the adventures that I go on, and I want to choose a mind and a soul that’s wide awake. Because, in a sense, it turns your hundred years on this planet into a thousand.
And so, I mean, that’s why I’m doing this bike trip.