Day Twenty-One

Today started at 6:15am to say goodbye to Andrew and Stephanie and to get my bike onto a trail that led to the Mississippi river, 40 miles round trip from Cannon Falls through Minnesota country. So I rode, and rode, and rode to Red Wing, MN which is basically Wisconsin. On my way over I stopped six times. One time because there was a deer and it's fawn in the path staring at me like a deer in bike reflector, one time because a wild turkey was on the path, one time because I saw two eagles being chased by birds smaller than pigeons and that came off as peculiar. And the other three times I stopped because I was choking on bugs. Once I arrived in Red Wing I parked on a park bench and finished the book Brave New World about a dsytopian future. It was a fascinating read and really was something fun to wrap my mind around as I sat on the river. The book is based on a bleak future of world order by intense social control where feeling and free thinking is totally abolished through caste systems, extreme behavioral conditioning, and just some really crazy stuff that turns people happy all the time, but totally mindless. Society is at peace, there are no diseases, life's pleasures are at a whim.. but at the cost of free will and being numb to life. The optimism of the whole thing is that there are a few who are able to question the system. They realize that in it is not just the happiness and pleasures in life that give us the human experience. It is the pain, the sufferings, the challenges that we encounter in life that make happiness genuine only through the reference points of feeling life's downturns. We have the opportunity to live mindlessly through life's distractions and work through the system, or we can choose to really feel life.

"And that is the secret of happiness and virtue- liking what you got to do. All conditioning aims at that. Making people like their inescapable social destiny." - The Director, Brave New World