The Livestrong Challenge

I have a short trip coming up - small on the calendar, but huge in significance - that I'll write more about soon.  This is just a preview.

In a little over a month from now, I'll be joining about 3,000 other people in Austin, Texas in a fund-raising event for the Lance Armstrong Foundation.  On a cool, dark Sunday morning, I'll get on my bike and set off on a long ride through the Hill Country.  After a dozen miles or so, when the peloton thins out, I'll have solitude under a enormous, splendid sky, with only the cadence of my pedaling to mark the time.  It's an odd time, when you are completely one with the physical effort, the elegant machine underneath you, the force of the wind (at your back, you hope!), and the sun on your skin, while at the same time, your mind is utterly free to roam.   

When I hit mile 80 or so, where my mind roams to is how hot, tired and thirsty I am.  But before I succumb to that, I marvel at the positive energy that radiates from this community of cancer survivors, people living with cancer, friends, family, and those who honor loved ones lost to cancer.  You might think that this is a depressing scene, but you would be wrong.  These people are a pleasure to be with, and their embrace of life inspires joy and hope.

Please take a minute to look at the Livestrong website and learn about this organization.  I like them and support them because they offer concrete, practical help to people in dire need of guidance in the crazy aftermath of a cancer diagnosis.  They use their resources not to re-invent the wheel or duplicate the work of other organizations, but to support and arrange partnerships among established groups on the theory that co-operation and sharing resources can add significantly to the results of solo efforts. 

They're great people.  And they ride bikes!    

Travel and tourism

One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings without trying to turn it into a healthy private pattern of one's own and I suppose that is the difference between travel and tourism - Freya Stark, Riding to the Tigris

Takoradi, Ghana

If you were browsing in the bookstore and saw a section labeled "Travel and tourism," you would probably not give it much thought.  In casual terms, they seem like more or less the same thing, and in practical terms, for many people, they are.  But they are significantly different.  The difference is not where you go, how you get there, or who you go with, at least not entirely.  The differences are in the nature of the expectations you bring with you and how willing you are to relinquish the comforts of what you know.  I don't mean just the physical things, like drinkable tap water and a soft bed.  I mean the "healthy private patterns" of our lives into which we try to fit everything that we see, or everything that happens to us, in order to relate them to what we understand.  Our patterns are like an index of familiar causes and effects, and when we come across something foreign to us, we turn to that index to find the key to make it familiar.  And when we find the familiar pattern, sometimes after much straining, we are comforted that we've turned the foreign into something recognizable.  At least to us.  In this way, even the brightest tourist comes home blissfully untouched, unchallenged, and unchanged by what he's experienced.

What am I driving at?  I'm pretty sure that in my life I've been both a tourist and a traveler.  I lay no claim to virtue for being either, and I don't like travel snobbery, either.  One can come home just as deeply changed by a week in Paris as one can from a week in a Kolkata slum.  Or just as deeply unchanged, for that matter.  What I want to do with this blog is to write about places I go and about what these experiences stir up in me.  Like a lot of people with the writing itch, I've stumbled and tossed about for inspiration for a long time.  In the end, I realized that the answer was in my daydreams.  If I add up all the hours I spend daydreaming about travel while I'm supposed to be working, I am a well-paid traveler indeed.  I realize that places I've been to have offered so much more than backdrops; they've been party to spirituality, love, learning, maturity, sex, friendship, nobility, peace, and, of course, countless stories.  

I think it's too narrow a reading to limit Stark's comment to geographic journeys; I think she also means the interior journeys that outward journeys inspire.

Anyway . . . that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Who is easydavid?

In Dakhindari, Kolkata, India

So where does the handle "easydavid" come from?  It came about like this.  We were hurrying around Dakhindari, a bustee in Kolkata, trying to keep up with children from Preyrona, a school supported by Empower the Children.  The kids were dashing about taking photos of their neighborhood for a cultural exchange project.  Now, westerners are few and far between in this neighborhood, so our presence was noticed.  Many people were eager to say hello, including a serious young man who approached me.  He introduced himself, rattling off a very long name that I could not hope to pronounce.  I nodded politely.  He then asked me, "What is your name?"  I replied, "It's easy - David."  He shook my hand and said, in his practiced English, "Pleased to meet you, easydavid."  And so I became easydavid, first to one young man in Kolkata, and now to you.