Giving up control

The bicycle vacation starts with a bus ride to Niagara Falls. A group of one hundred and forty bicyclists will start there Sunday morning and then traverse the state - basically bike down to Ithaca, then up to the town of Speculator in the Adirondacks - finishing seven days later in Saratoga Springs and averaging about 70 miles a day. In the past I would have been more stressed about where I was going to sleep, how was I going to get a shower at the end of each day, what would be for dinner? Pretty much each night we plan to stop at a place like a public school, so we can camp outside or we can sleep inside a building (e.g. in a gymnasium). On the bus ride I asked fellow bicyclists about what goes on in an average day, but I never got hung up on the details like I might have in the past. This year I also had concerns about having just done two and half months of physical therapy for my back, but I was able to create contingency plans in case it didn't hold up for the trip. Luckily, there would be massage offered every night!

When Robin and I planned to do this last year we were going to stay at hotels each night and we were working hard to figure out how we could bring our own car along so we'd have "freedom" to drive around in the evenings. There didn't seem to be a way for us to do the trip without retaining some control over things.

I'm still not sure why I didn't seem to be worried about the details this year, though I sense that it's part of an outlook developed over the past year that everything's going to work out as planned. That happened to be one of the philosophies that Robin and I shared and which made things more bearable, though Robin took it a step further and she would acknowledge that even if the cancer got her it was just part of the plan, so no need to stress about it.

I guess I approach grieving the same way we'd approached the treatments. You can sense the path you're going down and you can choose to go with it, or to fight it. Somehow fighting it seems to sap your strength and energy without a commensurate payback. I think these days I also have a greater a sense of trust that someone else has thought out the details, and even if they haven't, people have been through this before and survived. And honestly, there are people around the world who survive each day in much harsher conditions!

All I knew this time around was that I didn't need to be in control (when are we ever in control?) and things were going to be OK.