...Or don't tie any knots, because the point is that there is no secret formula to doing things "the right way," a simple notion strongly reinforced during my recent travels to Ecuador. More times than not you fill yourself through trial and error, try your hardest, and just see what type of shit comes out the other end; in great part, that's the beauty of life, that sometimes you simply don't know, but that you do anyway, I mean really do--and the chips, well, they fall wherever they want to.
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When today's lunchbox tipped over and its contents were spilled onto the pavement of Tymor's parking lot, there was an assortment of wondrous goodies revealed: a thermos of soupy, peanut-colored mud; a sprinkling of rain wrapped in reused tin foil; a salad of moistened coffee grind soil, verdant fern, and carrot-peeled roots; a medium-sized Tupperware full of laughter; and an unopened race. Savoring the scent of pine needles drying, while carefully consuming each and every morsel, to the last crumb, there was a complete and honest sense of inner-satisfaction that seemed to be reached. There was a certain fulfillment found through the process of digesting life's little pieces. Life, at least one vein of it, is about how well we digest things--the food is all there, sometimes we choose and sometimes things are chosen for us, but for the most part, it is about how we digest each, individual meal and about which nutrients we extract from the whole feast.
This afternoon I dined, and I dined well. I was one fluid movement with the contents of today's lunchbox, and although I may not have known what the outcome was going to be, I consumed anyway, knowing that I was capable of digesting the raw food of an experience, and that the chips would fall, one way or another.
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Also bringing a little Latin flavor to today's lunchbox was a Saran wrapped sandwich of the Campeonato Nacional del Ecuador, Ecuador's National XC Championships. I hope digestion went well for my friends racing in Loja this afternoon. As we were most likely on course around the same time, only worlds apart, you were all in my thoughts as we suffered, pushed, and pedaled together.
