So I conceived the idea of taking the Pacific Coast Bicycle Trail after I got my second folding bike, a Bike Friday Tikit. After I had gotten my first, a 2006 Dahon Speed P8, I rode my bike as never before (I’d been using a cheap mountain bike before that). Being able to take it inside with me in lots of places really lowered my stress around having it stolen, and in particular, my fairly uptight employer would let me keep it by my desk.

For a while, I worked in a far-off suburb, and that meant taking an hour-long bus ride each way. I got good at crossword puzzles, but it basically sucked; it didn’t help that it was yet another over-stressed, under-resourced I.T. job working with some of the most difficult communicators in the world–geeks. I am a geek, I love geekery, I don’t love geek culture. After learning Nonviolent Communication, my tolerance for intellectual one-upmanship and the idea that just because I’m really smart in some areas means I know everything worth knowing–well, I don’t put up with that very well. It isn’t fun for me anymore and hasn’t been in a long time.

I got a new, better (it seemed at the time) job. I got more money; I bought rain gear. I bike to work when it’s cold and wet and somehow, this makes me some kind of madman or super-stud. I say it keeps me dry and I don’t have to take the bus and train–and I get there faster.

I lost eleven pounds. I can go up stairs without being winded. My resting rate is 62 or so. I don’t say this to brag–it opened up a new world of amazing enjoyment for me. The feeling of freedom, the pride of accomplishment, even (a little) the flirting with danger (cars are scary!)–all those things conspired to make biking something not just fun but addictively, hugely grin-inducing.

I got the Tikit and it was fast. I could fit it under tables, I could fold it in 10 seconds, I could roll it around in the store. It was just a bit lighter than the Speed but enough so it felt really different. It’s that much more like an extension of my own body.

Around that time (just a few weeks ago) I was deciding to go on a trip–visit my pals in San Jose, and also check out the monasteries near Ukiah (Abhayagiri) and San Diego (Metta Forest); I’d been thinking I could pack the Tikit and take Greyhound or something. But I was having such crazy ecstatic joy biking, a thought I would normally never entertain popped up: I could just ride the whole damn way.

No way, I immediately thought. I researched on the Internet. People do this all the time. It’s a popular route. People go all the way down to South bloody America. They don’t actually get eaten by bears. I stayed up till two AM looking at bikes, watching videos of touring, giddy with believing I could take on something so mind-bogglingly huge.

My attachments are few. My wife and I separated a few months ago (very amicably, over time). I don’t really like my I.T. career. (OK, I hate it so much it’s actively toxic.) I really am just plain disgusted with the quantity of junk I’ve accumulated over all these years. And finally, all my life I’ve been waiting for the Big Adventure to come to me–for some portal to appear in my closet so I could go to Narnia, for aliens to come and take me away to strange new worlds, to ride dragons in Pern. I reaped a lot of alienated frustration and dissatisfaction from those fantasies. I think a couple of wheels and the kind of courage that comes of just not thinking too hard about it may be that door I have wanted for so long, so badly.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, and that I keep forgetting time and again, it’s that an open heart is the most powerful tool a human being may wield. I’ve seen it for myself, when I allow it; at other times I haven’t been able to believe my own closest friends that my presence and listening, and the humour that comes from my willingness to take risks, are what they value in me. And I’ve been hugely inspired by Gandhi, Badshah Khan, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Marshall Rosenberg, and many others who I believe demonstrate that this quality is more powerful than weapons, torture, and death. I guess I mention this after talking about doors because it’s my own fear that has kept those doors closed, played out as violence inside my own mind, heart, and body.

Overthrowing oppression starts with casting off fear. No tyrant needs to raise a sword when good people cower from fear learned throughout their lives, either of the threat of violence, or of deprivation. I don’t suffer that kind of fear–instead I have the privileged person’s shackles: social disapproval, withdrawal of addicting luxuries, jumping at the shadows of misunderstood intentions when emotional communication is so paltry.

I’ve named my blog The Heart’s Pole Star. My intention with this trip is to find a new orientation, one driven by the urgings that come from my own depths and guided by the wise counsel I have learned from the words of the Buddha, many Western philosophers, and, honestly, dozens and dozens of science fiction and fantasy authors, who were the first to articulate moral issues clearly without always insisting on one answer. Add to these my father, whose influence almost invisibly permeates my whole life, and my step-mother, whose practical way of thinking and humanness saved my life even when neither of us could really appreciate it.

Finally I am somewhat literally indebted to my mother. My memories of her are often very painful. She developed schizophrenia when I was about 11 or so, and it mostly got worse, with occasional periods of stability. She died a couple of years ago, and left my brother some $20,000 or so; she hadn’t made me a benefactor at all, but he chose to share it with me, and that money will be funding this trip and helping me set up a new life when I return.

This all makes it sound like I’m coming out of some dark place, and I guess on a scale of a year or so, I am. But this is a really happy time for me now, with everything opening up. And to experience pulling up stakes and travelling as discovery instead of running away–well, that is simply sweet.