Better to die living than live dying

 I'd concocted that line when a student in college, and my best friend was convinced I must have heard it somewhere. It was too good, and I guess he thought he wasn't interesting enough to have a friend that creative. He was wrong. He's quite an interesting bloke.

But interestingly, that line had been on sabbatical from my mind over the last year plus when I probably could have benefited from its tutelage. It came back yesterday. I was returning from Greenfield, enjoying a back roads through Hadley, complete with a dirt connection through farm fields, when a car passed. It wasn't especially close or aggressive, but it was big and car like, driven by a human being, with all the driving flaws and imperfections inherent in that title. In a newly visceral way, I realized just how vulnerable people, like me, are on the roads.

While I was still in the hospital last year and dreading the challenge of the fifty yard shuffle around the ward with a walker and a protective staff member on either side, I had recovered just enough to have more than two minutes of memory and was aware of the accident, what had happened. With that now, and even three minutes later, in my mind, I wondered if I would choose to ride a bike again even if I was once again capable of that.

The answer was and has been yes, and I'm pretty pleased with the paucity of paranoia that has come with it, but that realization on the road yesterday did give me pause, although, I did keep pedaling. Happily, the next thought was remembering that little motto created in my college days, which may be the best outlook for approaching that reality of vulnerability. I will die, but I have some time before that, and I want to spend it living. That means riding a bike.