Going Where Life Takes Us

Back when we were in Thailand, we bumped into B and Boris, on their bikes. We asked them where they were going,

"I don't know," they shrug, "I guess we'll just get on the bikes and see where life takes us."

This concept, which appealed to us so much then, has been frequently repeated between us ever since. The idea that we could start a day out without a plan, and 'go where life takes us' seems glamorously bohemian, nice and far away from our normal, well organised, well planned out western style lives, and, well just a little idyllic.

Somewhere in my mind, I have an idea that going where life takes us is like a sort of pact with life. We say that we will trust it, put ourselves in it's gentle, all embracing arms, and it carries us gently to something amazing, something which, had we planned our day ourselves, we would have missed out on. I expect, if I go where life takes me, that life has got some sort of special treat in store. Within this romantic notion it hasn't occurred to me that every day we more or less go where life takes us, planned or otherwise, our own planning being more or less a fiction we invent for ourselves to avoid facing up to the fact that we are not, actually in control. I forget, in fact, that life takes us down as well as up, it takes us into sorrows through which, perhaps, we learn wisdom, and it takes us down the paths of our own mistakes, from which we learn patience. I forget all of this when I say to Gemmy, 

"Could we take the bikes today? We'd like to cycle to the Buffalo farm and then...well we'll just go where life takes us."

Gemmy pulls one bike out for us, which he gives to M to ride down to his friend's house, where he keeps the other one, which, being Gemmy he has lent to his friend in the meantime. Also being Gemmy, he drives me down to pick up the bike, rather than leaving us to find it ourselves  but when we gets there he needs to leave us to it, as he has to get back for a massage client. 

We pump up the tyres on my bike. We spend a while adjusting the saddle and then I try it out for a while. If you need a refresher on the fact that for some reason I find cycling quite frightening, please refer back to previous blog entries. I find cycling scary. Don't ask me why, there are many possible explanations but they don't really matter. The upshot is that if you put me on a bike, I quail a little, find the cycling position on most mountain bikes immensely painful and uncomfortable, and generally expect to die every time a car or motorbike approaches. Today is no exception but - I am going where life takes me, remember?

Actually the first place life takes us, is to the bike repair shop. Gemmy has thoughtfully told us where this is and, even more thoughtfully, it happens to be on the way. M takes his bike in because the brakes don't work.

"The brakes are a bit dodgy," concedes Gemmy, gingerly taking it for a spin around the garden, before handing it to M, "maybe walk down the hills."

Apparently M has nearly fallen off it even coming down a slight incline on the way to meet us, and so we drop in the ask for the brake pads to be changed. We are at the repair shop for close to an hour. Which of course, is life's chance, to reward us for placing such trust in it, by arranging for some sort of chance meeting or chance sighting of something amazing that we would never have seen if we hadn't stopped at the bike shop.

There is no such occurrence, but it's OK.. Cheerfully, we wait until we are handed back the bikes, M's now rather more road worthy, and set off again.

I am gritting my teeth a little, as I cycle, and only just stopping myself from swerving dangerously onto the nearest verge every time another vehicle approaches, but I am rather proud of myself for remaining quite calm otherwise, and for doing it gamely, writing my own conclusion to the 'I went away and discovered I was scared of everything' story.

We arrive at the Buffalo park, having paused on the way to see the huge tree snake I mentioned in a previous blog. I do a quick calculation to work out if there is any way we might not have seen this if we hadn't gone where life took us, and concluded that it worked, if a little tenuously, if I said that we would not have timed our passing this bend in the road quite right, if we hadn't spend an hour in the bike repair shop. This seems a little more convincing looking back on it now than it did at the time, but then I was clambering off my bike, feeling the bones in my back shrieking as I tried to straighten them back up to a normal human walking position (why are mountain bikes designed to contort your body this way?), so I was a little distracted.

We wander around the buffalo park for a while, feed some buffalo and then eat some buffallo milk ice cream, M's, rather confusingly being apparently 'coin' flavoured. (We discover later that this was a mis pronunciation of 'corn', a sweet version of corn being quite prevalent in Malay sweetmeats.) We buy some mozerella, the idea being to make some sort of a caprese inspired salad and something spicy and Malaysian to eat with it tonight.

When we return to the bikes we discover mine has a flat tyre. I look around for the thing which life will give us in return for this set back, but nothing is immediately apparent. We ask at the buffalo park for the nearest bike repair shop or pump. They tell us that there is a bike repair shop but it is 'far away'. Listening to the explanation as to where it is, it seems as though it might be on the way to what we had thought might be our next destination, which we would be taken to, of course, by life, and life only, NOT through any sort of plan or intent. It is important that you understand that.

This accidental choice life has made for us is based on the fact that, on the map, the Masuri Museum, a museum dedicated to the legend of Masuri, central to Malay legends, (bear with me, I will tell you all these legends in a later post), is 'near' - ish. 

"Oh well," I say to M, who has phoned Gemmy who rather ingeniously suggests we call a taxi to take just the offending wheel back to the bike shop, travel back and reattach it, "let's just go with it. We can walk with the bikes towards the museum and hopefully we will find this repair shop on the way. 

This suggestion, and my willingness to concede to it, is all in the spirit of being adventurous and calm, you understand, and nothing at all to with the fact that I don't feel comfortable riding bikes.

We set off, wheeling our bikes. We chat as we go and the scenery is stunning, lush paddy fields, reservoirs, palm trees and bird song, but it is swooningly, eye blisteringly hot and after a while we lapse into companiable silence, punctuated by the odd, and unnecessary, "phew! It's hot!" from one or other of us, to which the other solemnly agrees.

Eventually, three things become clear. One is that there is no bike shop in the vicinity and it really is a long way to the museum, another is that we are still closer to the museum that anywhere else, so may as well continue on there, and the last is that there are quite a lot of quad bikes passing us, and staring, as you do tend to at two people wheeling bikes at the side of the road in the mid day heat. 

We round a corner and lo and behold, the third of those facts is explained. There is a quad bike hiring centre here. 'This is the moment!' I think, excitedly, 'this is when life takes us onto a quad bike and that's how we get home and it becomes an amazing story!'

We stop and ask the quad bike people about the repair shop. They look confused and produce a pump with which they blast air into my offending tyre. It seeps back out again with a whistle.

"You need a repair shop" advises the quad bike man.

We ask about the repair shop on the way to Masuri Museum. It seems this is fictional.

"Don't worry though," says quad bike man, "there is another repair shop". He describes the repair shop we visited on the way, when we fixed M's brakes.

We must have looked a little harried at that point, because he waves us in to his waiting room, offers us seats and gives us two little plastic bottles of cold water on the house.

 "See," I tell M though with rather less enthusiasm now, "if we hadn't got a flat then we wouldn't have got free water."

We resolve, unwilling to spend another hour or so trying to fix the tyre via a mixture of taxis and standing around  repair shops, to press on, diligently to the museum. We are rather cheered by our own game, 'just do it' attitudes.

"We really are changing through our travel," I think happily, "we're becoming quite cool."

Twenty minutes or so later, when we are wheeling our bikes through miles and miles of lush, green, completely open rice fields, the heavens open, and we are deluged in rain so thick we can barely see through it.

"Well at least it's not so hot now" I say to M over the pounding rain,

"What?" he shouts,

"At least it...not so hot...oh never mind."

We trudge, quite a lot less enamoured of where life is taking us now, and still rather doggedly ignoring the fact that we made a lot of these decisions ourselves, and that life has had little hand in it, other than to boil and then drench us, and provide us with a flat. The problem is not the rain, which is warm and wet, and genuinely cooling the heat, making heat stroke rather less alarmingly likely, but if you walk on soil in rain you tend to get covered in mud. You end up with grit in your shoes and everything about you feels like it's got grit rubbed into it. Water mingles with sweat and sun screen on my face, creating a rather tangy mixture to trickle into my eyes.

Somewhere in the distance we spy a collection of red roofed buildings.

"I think that's it," I say, relieved.

"It had better be good." says M.

We have travelled approximately 16 kilometres, mostly on foot. The scorching sun and driving rain have accompanied us in proportions of about half and half.

The museum  is, well, kind of average. I would say it was a 'must do', less because it is especially amazing, than because the Masuri legend is so key to Langkawi's cultural history. The museum tells us a little more detail, but is not hugely enlightening, though the wooden Malay houses also on the complex, are worth climbing up into, despite slippery, grit encrusted feet. I will tell you about the legend itself more fully later.

By the time we have seen all round the museum, and delayed the inevitable a little by eating some ice cream, we discuss possibilities for getting home. Really, the most viable option is to simply get on with it, pick up the bikes and wheel them the further 11 kilometres home.

Which is what we do. It is at this point, when it starts raining again, then dries, leaving the mud caked onto us in cracking streaks, that my jolly 'look where life is taking us' persona falters a little, and looks around for support.

"Well I don't know what I'll write my blog about," I say to M, who is wheeling his bike next to mine, "it was supposed to be about going where life takes us."

"Haven't we?" asks M.

"I don't know," I say. I explain my thoughts at the beginning of this blog, that perhaps we are always going where life takes us, and choices we make are only an illusion.

"Well then we did go where life took us," says M 

  "I guess so," I say doubtfully, "I just thought there would be some reward. You know, because we were wet and had to wheel the bikes we encountered something wonderful that we wouldn't normally have done..."

"and?" says M

"and all we encountered was some mud."

I say it with muck glumness and it makes us both laugh. Mock grumpiness is rather a life saver in situations when you are teetering on the cusp of being actually grumpy. It swerves you quickly off the wrong path and away from taking yourself too seriously.

But really, as we finally finish our long trudge home, having managed to pick up some vegetables to make dinner with, and even found the repair shop near to home still open, returning to Gemmy two working bikes, the rather obvious fact occurs to me, that going where life takes you isn't about a saccherine ending in which yo get some sort of reward, it's about how you deal with the bumps and the bruises, the rain and the sunstroke, and that's what ultimately provides you with your reward.

My shower, when I finally get home and get into it, is one of the most luxurious moments of my life, purely because life gave me a dousing and smeared me in grit. Our mozerella, despite having been bounced around and heated and dampened alternately on its long journey homewards, still tastes good despite being a little disintegrated.

Life has not deal us an earthquake, famine, warfare or the violent loss of our loved ones. It gave us a bit of warm rain to contend with and a flat tyre. I think we can handle that. I think we can go there.

Later, M asks me whether the experience has put me off cycling even more.

"No," I tell him, "it's kind of inspired me."

"Really?" he says.

"Yes, really," I reply, "it showed me how cool I was. Loads of girls would have made a right fuss about that day,about the flat tyre and the walking and the getting wet and the mud. It's pathetic, and not exactly life threatening, but lots of girls would have done so."

"True," says M, "but you didn't."

"No." I say. "I was fine. You see? You have a great wife."

"I never doubted it." says M.

And perhaps that is the point. Our hurdles, in the west, are relatively small. Mine are even smaller than that. Compare me with lots of people and I've led a charmed life. I can afford to be cheery. But really, everything, absolutely every little tiny thing depends on how, at the heart of it, you feel about yourself.  Wobble your ego and tiny things seem huge to you. The more you over react, the more you know it, and the less respect you have for yourself. Going where life takes you requires a kind of bravery that actually has nothing to do with life. Life is going to treat you the same way either way. It's the bravery that allows you to accept who you are, and in doing so, improve it. Getting drenched matters a lot if you worry that you are nothing without your hair and your make up being perfectly crafted. Getting drenched when your hair has been shoved into a bun and you've long since stopped bothering with make up because you always sweat it off instantly anyway, and that's just not an issue. Walking a long way unexpectedly bothers you less if you have a concept of yourself that tells you that you can do it, or that gives you the credit for being able to handle things. 

At the end of the day everything always comes back to you. Life is what you see through the filter you craft for yourself. It's not something that 'takes' you. It's not something you follow.

It's a film that you edit.