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Editorial

Monday Morning Editorial

The Road Less Travelled Makes All The Difference

Editorial By: Chris Callen

Originally Published In The March 2015 Issue Of Cycle Source Magazine

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So the holidays are over, the tree is in the trash, even the hangover from New Years Eve is gone….. What now? For whatever reason, this time of year always comes with a certain amount of melancholy. I’m not sure if it’s because of the long months we are off the road and away from our friends and family that we spend the year riding motorbikes with or if it’s the time we spend indoors waiting to get the bikes back out and join the living world. Either way, around the middle of winter each year, I often find myself assessing my life and the people in it. This year there are so many changes going on that the process was getting me a little bit down. There were so many good people taken from us this year, and others while still with us are somehow missing from the pictures of recent events. Where does the time go my friends and if anyone has a way to slow it for just a moment, please speak now. The truth is life just happens when you aren’t paying attention. As we get a little older there are friends that have moved on to different lives, made choices that have kept us apart, or accepted responsibilities that keep S them from doing as much as we would like. Some, as I have mentioned, are gone and leave a hole that can’t be filled. Even though there will be new friends that come along, things keep changing and losing touch seems to be an increasing part of life.

Who can you blame for the lives we are faced with these days? It seems harder than ever before to keep all the balls spinning. The daily grind kicks your ass. Add a few little extras like going to the gym or running the kids from place to place and you turn around and boom, another year is gone, and then five and then it’s been ten.

I shall be telling this with a sigh, Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. – Robert Frost

Now this is where old Bob Frost’s poem comes into play about the two paths in the woods. I love this poem, especially for the perspective it gave me this month. Ya see, it’s been a long-standing tradition that at the end of any ride we take, especially a nice long one, that we never really say good bye. At one point we just break off from the group and take our own way home, the goodbye is implied. This is unlike the typical scene when we get ready to leave for a run or to head out to an event where the whole group meets at a designated spot. The end finds us traveling together and, one at a time, taking our own paths, a divergence from the group, back to our own lives. Now this serves as a great metaphysical reminder that what really matters is the time we have spent with each other, the memories we have created and the bond we share from them. The end of anything is almost never met with a smile but in this case it is bitter sweet because in fact we know we will be together again, sooner or later. Until that day, or even if this happens to be the last time we ever get to spend with each other, we have what we did, what was said and the memories from it that will last a lifetime. I think that’s still what the straights may never get about our lifestyle, the celebration that is being with each other. If you’ve read Cycle Source for a while now you know from the photos that we rarely leave anything on the table when we are together. I think this is because we cherish each other and that moment in time with so much respect that we live it like they are our last days…… Because the simple fact is… it just may be. So with love in my heart for my brothers instead of contempt for the winter, I now sit silently with a stupid grin thinking about how lucky we are and how much a regular life must suck.

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