Pyrophoric Prophet

Pyrophoric:

-adjective

1. Capable of igniting spontaneously in air

"A good traveler has no fixed plans,

and is not intent upon arriving."

-Tao Te Ching

A good traveler can sit still. 

She can sit still while the path of her formerly fixed plan rushes past. Her plan surpasses her, and maybe continues to exist on wheels of its own rolling down the crowded, shiny Florida highway. 

Such a traveler was born about a week ago when my bike and I met Gary. We met him at his bike shop, where he mended a shipping wound, sold me lime green handlebar tape and a helmet, and told me that he had lost eight of his customers to accidents since he'd been working with bicycles and their humans in Florida. He told me that the state has the most bicycle rider fatalities in the country. And he told me all about his encounters with the foes of a human on a bike, from rednecks to fallen logs.

I resented it.

I thought, the man knows I'm going on a tour. Tomorrow. Because I told him. And he doesn't have the decency to withhold this injection of fear and anger, an injection so strong, as I stood there enraptured by his severe stories, that I could feel the adrenalin hot in my blood.

He was a signal. He was a pyrophoric prophet. A combustion of anecdotes capable of igniting at the touch of a single sentence. He was full of care and compassion, and he was full of fury and fright.

The combination enthralled me as the sun went down. When I left I was not sure whether to consider him a friend, or a loud echo of all the fears and excuses that anyone ever thinks up when confronted with the concept of a bicycle tour.

I was sure that the light was almost gone from the sky and that I would be late for dinner. Somewhere, flying along beside the rush hour headlights, bouncing up over cracks in the sidewalk, magically aware of the many movements of the mechanical world all around me, I thought two thoughts, also contradictory and combustible.

I love this.

And,

I don't want to do this shit.

That night I lay awake, trying not too look into the center of what caused the explosion. All that fear, that injection of adrenalin, would have meant nothing, if what I had been about to do had meant more.

I knew that what I was really afraid of was letting go of the plan.

But,

A good traveler has no fixed plans