I was riding my bike today, on a Monday.
I worked on Saturday afternoon for about four hours to free up the time on Monday to go out with one of my friends I've ridden with a lot.
He's older than me, the type of person who's trained and looked after himself his whole life, except 2 or 3 years ago he got the diagnosis that his coronary arteries were almost closed. He thought he was gonna have to have a bypass.
He didn't in the end and had stents and has almost (physically) fully recovered, but when we stopped at a cafe today for a coffee, we were chatting about life and all that stuff (he's a really good philosophical sounding board), and he was explaining how it's hard to recover psychologically when something like that happens.
It feels wrong that he tried his best his whole life to look after himself and then got dealt a tough hand on the jeans, but that's the way it goes, I guess.
We rode for about 30-odd miles, and then I pulled off to do another 20 (50 miles on a Monday is really good for me), and as I was cycling, after I'd left him, I stopped for a short while, just to have a banana that was in my pocket, and take off my gilet.
I found myself outside a house in a little village in South Nottinghamshire.
A nice house, quite big, really, really well presented.
It looked though that it was almost perfect but probably hadn't had any sort of investment in it for a few years.
The garden was absolutely spot on, the fencing was beautiful, and the outside hose was wrapped beautifully around the hook. It was picture perfect.
It was a retired person's house.
Someone who has the time to do all the tiny little bits and all the tiny little jobs.
I reflected on the fact that my house that we bought last year is a lifetime project, and as I walk around it at the moment, almost everything is wrong and almost nothing is right.
It’s a middle-class problem, I understand, but I realised that I'm at the complete opposite end of the house I stood outside eating a banana today.
What I reflected on, though, afterwards and riding back home from there (bike riding is a huge philosophical exercise for me), is that when I get to that point, when my house is finished, what do I do then?
I'm not really for getting to the end of my projects, not really for ‘finishing’.
I always want there to be something else to do, and I will always manufacture something else to do.
In the cafe where my friend and I had stopped, we talked about that age that we get to when we wonder whether it's worth training anymore, whether we should continue. How tired we are, how hard it is to get up, get out, get going, and hurt ourselves up the hills and on the sprints to try and be fitter and better. I talked about not going quietly into that dark night, not just fading away, and we agreed that we would try our best not to do that.
If I have the house that I sat outside today having a banana at, basically I'm waiting there in the house, snipping the grass, adjusting the fence and tidying up the hose on the hook outside, just waiting for the reaper to knock on the door.
I'm sure he'll tell me that my garden is tidy before he takes me away, but I'm not really for going in that way if I can help it.
As soon as I finish a project, I need another one, and then another and then another.
Success for me is having a s**t tonne of unfinished projects when he comes to knock.
Blog Post Number - 4571
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