Gud@lyfe101.edu

Some lessons cannot be taught in school. To be good at life, one ought to find teachers wherever one goes. Confucius say: 三人行，必有我师. (Any) three men walking, for sure my teacher is among them. 

But to find good teachers, they are few and far between. I came across this interview on the internet about a married pair who traveled the world by bicycle with their two children. Their example is a lesson I longed to receive and chased after empty-handed through long years of education.

"Alice Goffart and Andoni Rodelgo biked around the world for 7 years. They started shortly after their first child Maïa was born, kept going through their second pregnancy and gave birth to Unai on the road!" - http://www.icebike.org/mundu/

I am touched by why they travel. It's not about how far you go or how long it takes you. I'm not amazed by their feat. Not the traveling on bicycles part. Honestly, neither are they if you read their interview.

Here is their message:

"I hope our children will follow whatever dreams they have, one does not need to travel to live like a traveler.

I hope I will pass our values to them. The values of openness, of curiosity, of respect and understanding. I hope they will be fearless.

I mean, fear is good as long as it is out of instinct like fear of fire and of a storm. Fear that helps you avoid imminent danger or that make you respect yourself and be gentle to yourself.

But too often we are manipulated and driven by fears that lock us in cages and make us follow irrational choices."

It's about the liberated will of brave individuals choosing to separate from the herd. To make choices that they believe in, to live in pursuit of what they want. Not to be held hostage by their futures, not trapped by fear of losing a planned outcome so as to never really live or chase life. Hedging against an inevitability that we all must face, our death.

It's not that they give their children the world, full of cultures and fashions that they can smell, taste, and touch. It's that moving between them allows them to experience a commonality that supersedes any or even all modes of living. Life, above all else, exemplifies growth, adaptation, irrepressible self affirmation.

“Because the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.”
― Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park