Reconnecting

It’s been around 10 or 12 years since I’ve communicated with my nephew who lives in Florida. My family is like that though. I’m the youngest of five, and we all love each other, as siblings normally do, but we don’t talk or see each other very often. When we are together we catch up over a few hours or a day and then return to our established lives. We stay in touch through social media, but we’ve never been close like my wife’s family. They talk by phone and see each other often, even though they live in different parts of the country.

My nephew reached out to me recently and asked if he could stop in Tulsa to visit on his way across the country bicycling from Florida to Seattle. I eagerly agreed to such a visit and offered our spare bedroom for as long as he wanted to rest before proceeding.

He also turned me onto his weblog where he’s documenting his ride. So far he’s been on the road for about a month. I’m getting addicted to his almost daily updates with photos and descriptions of where he’s been, which has been some very off the beaten path roads. He’s definitely been meandering along remote, back-country roads, dirt roads, trails, etc. He’s meeting locals all along the way and it appears that he’s having tons of fun even though riding 90 miles in one day sounds like a lot of work to me.

What I’m building up to is that I’m grateful that I have the opportunity to follow him, and I’m grateful to him for including me in his journey. Hopefully I can convince him to stay an extra day to rest in town when he gets here, and feed him protein and plenty of veggies to prepare him for the next phase of his trip.

Mainly I just want to catch up with him, hear about his life, find out how his sister and her kids are doing, and generally catch up. Putting family in more of a prominent place in my heart and mind is a focal point of my personal evolution. I’m a dreamer. A rather lazy dreamer at that. But I need to accept that I have time in my life to pursue something this worthy. Accepting reality and changing to meet it face to face is difficult when you’re used to being in the groove – aka rut from a different perspective.