If you can dream it
If you can dream it, you can do it.
(It’s a quote wrongly attributed to Walt Disney. While there is a Disney connection, it was actually Sheralyn Silverstein who coined this phrase).
These words were on a card my work colleagues gave me several months ago, after we completed a big event. The words spoke not only to this adventure, but really to the way I try to approach my life.
Cycling 2,400 km from London to Rome is the most ambitious (and challenging) thing I've undertaken. I've long had a thirst for adventure. One time, I rollerbladed from my apartment in Vancouver three hours and 30 km to my now wife Carrie's house in Surrey. When I turned 40, I walked from Nazareth to Bethlehem and for my 50th, I walked 300 km from the source of the Thames River to its end east of London.
When I finished that walk, someone asked me what adventure I had planned for my 60th birthday. I hadn't given it much thought; it was eight years away. But that question stayed in my mind and reminded me often that it was there. I realized I don’t have many of those milestone birthdays that end in a zero left. Two. Maybe three, if I'm lucky.
Perhaps, subconsciously my own health was urging me to seek out new experiences, and not wait for some arbitrary birthday. Four years ago, a doctor stuck a long needle into my hip and withdrew some fluid from the marrow. If that experience wasn't enough, he had the audacity a few weeks later to tell me I have a bone marrow disease. For now, thankfully, it's being controlled by medication but it's only the fool who thinks tomorrow is promised.
Not that I need encouragement, but my wife gave me a buff, a tubular piece of cloth that I wear around my neck when cycling to keep warm or to protect from the sun. There are three words on it that couldn't be more apt—live more now.
I have always been fascinated by maps. As a child. I would go to bed with an atlas in hand. So, when I came across Sasha Trubetskoy’s subway-style maps of the ancient Roman road network, I was intrigued. And almost immediately I saw an adventure for me in these coloured lines.
It's been said that all roads lead to Rome. Tomorrow, pedal by pedal, I will begin putting that idea to the test. And that card my colleagues gave me? I'm carrying it with me. It’s tucked inside the front cover of my notebook.
Trubetskoy’s subway-map depiction of the Roman road network.