Last winter, I biked at least 10 miles everyday. From the home office to coffee shops and client meetings. Only missed 2 days due to awful weather. This winter, traveling to my clients wasn’t as convenient. Both my road and mountain bikes gathered dust all winter. This week, just in time for spring, I got out on the bike and made that ride downtown.

A couple summers back, Milo, Bob and I spent a week canoeing through the Boundary Waters. As you may have gathered from my Weekend in the Northwoods post, lack of mobile phone service makes me uneasy.

In the middle of a lake, exhausted from paddling all day, with the closest shore a few hundred yards away and still portages away from our day’s target, I came to the simplest of conclusions:

If you stop paddling, you stop moving, and you’ll never get there.

This afternoon, halfway through the ride home, I was winded. Done. Rusty from not riding for 3 months, my legs had enough. At that moment, 4 miles from home, near nothing, I remembered the simplicity of canoeing through the Boundary Waters and thought:

If you stop pedaling, you stop moving, and you’ll never get home.

Cars, buses, and the momentum of our working day often make arriving at our destinations inevitable. Out of our direct control. It’s unfortunate. There’s something refreshing when the only way to move forward is to put one foot forward and repeat.