Wheels still spinning

Traction. It gets talked about a lot at the moment.

I feel like my wheels are spinning. But while wheels are spinning, experiences are being absorbed, other peoples words are being listened to and I am reading and thinking and dreaming.

I think dreaming is important. I suspect to some it might look like I am procrastinating. I am not. I am…measuring things up. Accumulating information and connections. Assessing impact and reach. Finding out who my friends are, who my colleagues are and who my fellow dreamers are. They are not the people I thought they would be. I don’t mind that. Life is like that. People are like that. Sometimes you cross paths at the right time and sometimes it’s the wrong time.

But back to dreaming. I never have before. Others used to speak of dreaming of their wedding day and I’d wonder what was wrong with me that I never did. Then I realised, I never dreamt of anything at all. There was no room for dreaming. No room, actually, for glitter, sparkles, spangles, fizz or bubbles

I have spent the last 5 years making up for that. Owning it, acknowledging it, losing the resentment for it and finally coming out of the other side of the silliness and frivolity a different person. I am still a little more in touch with my ‘inner child’ that most. I can’t help that and wouldn’t want to – glee is flying down the side of a big hill with your hands off the brakes, and funny is trying to explain no you really did get that black eye from walking into a tree branch head on – but even that can and will be used in the future, I think, as a constant reminder never to be too serious, that hard work and dedication and determination will get you so far, but always, there is the tiniest element of luck, but if the dice rolls the wrong way, you’ve not lost your life. You are still breathing. The world still turns and you are still standing on it, a part of it.

I find risk taking fascinating. I was, for a long time, risk adverse. I remember sitting in pubs, many pubs, in many pub quizzes, knowing the answers but never venturing to mention that I did. I wouldn’t, because I had noticed that I was more often wrong than right and I felt that that meant I should never speak at all. What I forgot is that being right can be the difference between coming 3rd or 4th, just the same as being wrong can be. So ultimately, the risk looked like it was 20/80 – when in actual fact it was 50/50.

What I find strange in both myself and in others who I ride with, is the ability to be massive risk takers when we ride our bikes – we think nothing of only covering the brakes, not using them, nothing of dropping off 3 foot drop offs which would make others cringe back in fear – and yet in our normal every day lives, we are not risk takers, in the main. We are normal boring people doing normal boring things.

I don’t want to be normal or boring. But not for me. I understood something reading How to be a social entrepreneur this morning. He says that often the most successful social enterprises are based on the fundamental injustice someone has experienced first hand, that the powerful emotive feeling of reaction to that injustice can be harnessed, can be used for good. Can drive. Can be positive.

Well I tick those boxes.

What I don’t tick is very many others which I suspect will be covered in the rest of the book. But for now, it is enough to know that the thing which I honestly thought was a negative trait in me, is actually the one thing which might mean my complete lack of experience in all other areas can be minimalised, born by someone else, can be absorbed.

What do I do well? The things that I care about. The things I love. The things I connect with on a visceral level. The things which make my heart sing and dance.

I’ll get there. Wheels still spinning. Doesn’t matter if it’s in one, ten or twenty years. Ill get there.

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