Three Red Words
Many an evening I go for a bike ride. My preferred route is a relatively short one- 13 miles. It’s an individual ride, sometimes devoted to mental decompression from the day’s stresses and activities and sometimes focused on speed. I’m on a heavy mountain bike, and the challenge for me is seeing what kind of miles-per-hour average I can attain. Over the past six months I’ve watched as my average speed has steadily climbed from around 11 mph to 14.3 mph.
On the weekends, however, I go for a much longer ride. Distances vary- I’ve ridden as few as 18 miles and as many as 70 -but always the purpose is to spend time on my bike and enjoy the pure experience of riding. To that end, I will sometimes ride along the Trinity Trails in Fort Worth, Texas, a long and interconnected series of riding and running trails that afford anyone who wants it hours of uninterrupted “think time.”
One day not long ago, as I was completing the final leg of a 42-mile ride along the last in a series of serpentine bends, my head was down and I was just kind of studying the passing concrete beneath my wheels. I had kept up a respectable pace the whole way, but as will happen on that particular stretch of the trail, I had hit a frustrating and continuous headwind that was making it difficult to keep my bike, my head, and my spirits up. As with long and steep hills, I have learned that when the wind is fighting you, resistance is not necessarily futile, it’s just best to drop to a lower gear and reduce your effort by an instinctual percentage, thus preserving some energy for the final miles.
So, as I was pedaling these twists and turns with my head bowed, struggling against the open-field breezes and at the same time letting my mind wander, a word passed below me. Mind now, I was in the middle of a field with overgrown grass beginning to creep across the concrete trail and little else. No houses or buildings or parking lots in sight; no direction signs, no water fountains . . . just open fields on both sides, with the Trinity River wending alongside perhaps a hundred yards to my left.
Perhaps the word I saw had always been there, but I don’t think so. In any case, I noticed it for the first time that morning, and only for a second, but it was bright and clear and seemed almost three dimensional, as if it were raised in relief off the concrete. Painted in the upper right hand corner of the cement square I was passing over by some anonymous and benevolent artist, the letters of the word were about four inches high and dazzling red. I scarcely had time to process the word as it passed under me when, in the upper right hand corner of the sidewalk square only one concrete panel removed from the first, a second word appeared. Two squares later, a third word appeared, and two squares after that, a small pictograph concluded the message. Strung together, the three words and pictograph conveyed the simplest of messages:
FOLLOW
YOUR
HEART
❤
Is this a trail of breadcrumbs leading me to where I’m meant to be? I wondered. Is this a pictograph here to remind me there’s no walking hand-in-hand with your love and passions if all you set your mind to is surviving tomorrow’s uncertainties? Is it all just empty daydreaming, or did I get here intentionally?
When I think about us, I remember the pain of when we failed, the joy of when we got it right. I ask myself how often the picture comes in focus, how many times I can ride the trail before the message fades away.
Follow.
Your.
Heart.
A message on my journey, nearing the end, reminding me that true passion never fades. Reminding me there’s still time. Reminding me of a question a fellow traveler asked me once:
“If all jobs in the world paid the same, what would you do?”
A question easily asked, maybe even easily answered. The harder question is, if that’s what you would do, why aren’t you doing it?
This is not the first time I’ve come across this message in recent months. In fact, I wrote about it here not so long ago in “Cloud Vaporizing” and “Discovering the Sound of My Own Voice,” among others.
Someone I had never even heard of, let alone met, asked the question this way: “Anything that you’re doing . . . anything that you’re doing now that’s not leading you toward your desired goal in life, then watcha doin’ it for? Ya’ll can come up with them excuses- ‘One o’ these days, one o’ these days . . .’ Forget that. I believe if everybody excelled to the heights of what they enjoyed doin’ the most . . . Well some of you said, ‘Well, that’s all it’d end up . . .’ No! It’s not on that plane! Oh, joy to the world, there’s many ways to experience life!”
And, beloved, that’s the plane I find myself on now. I’ve been away from this arena all summer because I finally caught the message those three little red words burned into my mind at the end of a long, hot ride in the middle of a field: to follow my heart. My heart is at my desk with my stories, and for years and years I’ve been writing tales and tucking them away and sending them away and been literally aching for people to read them. I set about getting them published, in print, and that’s all I’ve been doing with every free minute I’ve had. And I’m still doing it. Put a new website together, too: www.cheathjohnson.com Why?
Because it’s my passion.
Because . . . I’ve always known what my passion was and what I was born to do.
I just wasn’t doing it.
Originally published July 16, 2013
