Bananas and Seats

Relax and let the breeze take you.

​I have it on good intelligence that wherever you endeavor, and whether it be solo, or with an unwitting accomplice, 'wandering off' always sharpens sovereign control over one's own destiny. It is the act of wandering off that shapes and frees a person. Whether you venture out for a Coffee, for some fresh herbs, whether you are seeking a photo in the eye of a storm,  mapping a coastline, or staring at the sea, you are in control of that fate, and thereby your kingdom.

​When one becomes dehydrated, hungry, or dislocated from familiar surroundings there can be small moments of adjustment, or torrents of inexplicable shifts in behavior.  The first reaction to these is to ignore them and move on, the second is to accept them and make changes, and what occurs next can decide your fate. So let's assume that you venture out into the desert without a canteen, or leave on a sailing adventure without a life preserver.  The road that led to the moment when you considered that neither was required, was paved without the expectation,  to require either one.  So in this example, questionable judgement seems to manifest and then repeat.  Let's say you plan to visit an arch in Bryce Canyon, and wittingly leave the canteen in the car.  Great timing!, you will only be a few minutes or hours right? One may speculate that your first choice to ignore the need for water was a poor one.  A few hours pass, and you know that you should head back, but the sun lowers in the sky perfectly so that an arch is lit in such a manner that you begin to capture great images.  No need really to make changes, because it's all worth the chance. Potential risk cast off as if b a doting parent.
​Now let's leave for a quick sail after breakfast stimulated by a single origin fair trade coffee and buoyed by a donut, you venture out on your tiny 'J' class boat leaving the PFD behind. No problem... it's shore sailing, and you do it all the time.  You are sailing no further than you would swim anyway, right? Easily justified risk., if you noticed a risk at all. The chance of needing to float until help arrives seems slim.

​"...Chance favors the prepared mind." -Louis Pasteur

​So you are 6 years old and it appears that your first solo circumnavigation of the neighborhood should take mere minutes, and or maybe more, but you've never really contemplated the time thing, unless by measure of boredom, such as in Church, School, or When Grounded. Never have I quantized the time differential between grounded to your room for an hour, and an hour's long bike ride.  If you'd anticipated a bike ride would last as long as the eternity that is " being grounded to your room", then surely you would not have overlooked the provisioning.  A bike ride cannot take as long as an hour's grounding right? Hey, we see all sorts of patterns in leaves, beaches, and wall-paper, but we don't seem to match the pattern with any hard lesson and at an early age, will sustain to and through adulthood. Louis Pasteur may have advised that merely being in the properly educated and open frame of mind may have opened us to the likelihood to embrace such a lesson.  Well, some of us take more than one go-round to make sense of what is around us.  This tunnel vision always comes when we are singularly focused upon a goal.  I think that this also contaminates science and delays many discoveries. If we begin with an open and engaged mind, we may stand a far better chance to a discovery.  Perhaps except for learning to ride a bicycle, we forget to make more opportunities to learn a new workflow.  Like walking, Bicycling seems to be something one never forgets, nor sees the need to adjust for point of view. 
So Here it begins --  As a child, we set off unprepared, and view time as an abstraction. Learning is latent, as we linger into adulthood the adventure photos you are taking could shift time 'til darkness makes it rough or impossible to return to your parked car.  It also follows that sailing someplace close-by, could never really put a small craft in danger. 
​Wandering off has always been a fascination, and this fascination begins somewhere and never seems to elicit lesser feelings of adventure and sovereignty, for in 'wandering off', one is in command of their destiny, regardless of the outcome.

​Anyone should be able to draw a distinction between a Banana, and a Banana Seat. My first Schwinn was built for a passenger, and the bass boat sparkle of the white banana saddle only propped up my underweight frame.  I remarked to myself that there would come a time when this sort of adventure needed to be shared, and that if I'd seen anything revelatory in the cemetery, then I would return home quickly and grab someone to show them.  My seat would accommodate another.  I stopped at the crosswalk, and in a sense at a true cross-roads, because I was about to negotiate a crossing over to uncharted territory. I now knew that I really had not planned for all contingencies, and that I was winging it.  There was no patience button at the cross-walk, saying "press to cross", these amusements had not yet been invented.  In the period seat-belts, and helmets were not standard equipment.  If one wore a helmet it generally meant that they were recovering from brain surgery, and if one used a seat-belt, it meant that they personally bolted the lap-belt to their floor.  I now believe that a Seatbelt is a good idea, and that a Helmet is also beneficial, but I still don't believe that the "press to walk" button is wired to anything at all, so it's just as well that they don't exist when I'm six years old, and as I stand at the corner of a busy intersection, I consider the best way to navigate to the other side. Simple decisions are simple enough to make when one is clear of thought, but stress peaks hunger or thirst to make even the simple seem worth second thought.  I am hungry, and my banana seat is not a banana.
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