FOLLOW YOUR YELLOW BRICK ROAD

A quiet pedal down a sunny leaf-blanketed rail trail is the perfect atmosphere for self-reflection and spiritual maturing.

Just be careful not to let the wicked witch of the south’s flying monkeys … demons from untethered mental white noise … swoop down interrupt and fly away with your thread of thought to the castle of repetitive thinking.

Don’t get hung up in the record-skipping spin of rumination.

Karla McLaren, the guru of understanding human emotion, makes the insightful observation that underlying agendas suited in some fashion-spun manifestation of anger … annoyed to aggravated to bitter disgust … can actually be very good. She points out that they are human emotions and are there for some reason. Anger is an emotion that helps you establish and set your limits.

You must see through this situational anger and move on.

Like a martial arts instructor will tell their student, nervous about an upcoming board(s) or block(s) break in an upcoming certification test, to set focus beyond the obstacle to best pass through the problem (board or block) to allow moving on.

Recognize those limits of tolerance and jump out of the mind-dizzying spin of rethinking and rethinking what’s bothering you.

My last several rides have been dominated by thoughts of a business partner that broke a bond of trust and deceptively stole from the business on a few different levels.

No longer repeating that question and ruminating in anger … excusing that anger and owning the fact that it did happen allows moving on to the proactive planning to bring back mental balance along with striking back justice to the business plan that had been so badly wronged.

There is no better place to let this process of self-cleansing happen than out quietly pedaling down a paved railroad bed covered by the same tree canopy that harbors over a century of railroad adventure stories … and flying monkeys.