I did a thing.
Over 5,000 miles on a motorcycle riding mostly off road across America. Starting in North Carolina and ending with my boots touching the cold waters of the Pacific in Port Orford, Oregon. Travelling through record high temperatures in the south easily surpassing one hundred degrees most days. Heat so overbearing we’d start our days around five o’clock, and be forced off of the roads by one or two. Fatigue driving us into our dirty motel beds midafternoon. Unconscious until the early dawn day.
I’d been planning this trip for the past five years, and was ready to leave a year ago. And then Covid hit. I got sick. And then got sick again. My business online was for sale, and then it wasn’t after three offers that were withdrawn at the last minute. A recession had set in. Gas prices were at an all time high. People were holding their money. And I was holding my face. After Covid ravaged my lungs a second time, I developed a spasm on the left side of my face which progressed from an eyelid twitch to a full on half face scrunch. Doctors would later find the artery that was pulsing on the nerve below my left ear just inside my skull. It would require surgery to repair and separate the two.
I had lost fifty pounds to take the trip, and gained it all back beforehand. I’d lost most of the muscle strength I’d acquired while quarantining and watching the world explode from the television in my living room. I was far from the peak shape I’d set out to leave being in.
Yet here I was, in Oregon – with my boots in the salty water of the ocean.
On my office whiteboard, I’d come up with options for the trip that were pretty ridiculous in hindsight. Ranging from not going at all, to bringing a Starlink satellite dish along with me on the road to run my online business while we were away, fearing a lack of internet signals while gone. (I didn’t mention how the salesmen we’d hired to run things for us while we were away wasn’t working out…another log on my anxiety fire.) I was pretty close to pulling the plug altogether and waiting for “a better time.” I use quotations because of something I learned years prior.
There is no better time. Ever. For anything. There’s the moment, and then that moment is gone.
I’d sat in front of customers that were interested in my software – a program that had a 4.9/5.0 rating online – and asked them what was preventing them from moving forward and getting the one thing that would give them what they professed to me moments earlier was their dream.
“Not today….let me think about it”
I’d never hear back from them again.
And so I did a thing. And I went. And it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It broke my motorcycle and my body and my spirit. I was in tears one day and laughing maniacally to myself the next day. And when I returned, I wasn’t the same person that I was when I had left. I traded a piece of me for a newer piece. The very thing I wanted to help people find and have for themselves here, with Enlytened.
The doing of the thing is the hardest thing. Breaking it down into smaller and smaller infinitesimally small pieces that aren’t towering over you in your brain. And doing the first tiny thing. Wake up. Get dressed. Take the cover off of the bike. Fill up my water bag. Go.
I needed to do this trip before I opened up the website. Doing the hardest thing I’d ever done just before you did the hardest things you’ve ever done. We’re in it together.