A typical day in my life begins between four and five a.m. The first hour or so is for meditation and God time, followed by a fresh medium-roast coffee session. I take mine black, no sugar, thank you.
I typically read, jot notes in my journal, or doodle something on a notepad. My wife and our rescue mutt, Under Dog, sleep soundly as I begin suiting up for a bicycle ride.
This morning, I rolled out a little after six a.m. The morning air was eighty degrees, cooler than normal for the Sonoran Desert in late September. My street was quiet as I pedaled toward the gravel.
Within a few minutes, I climbed the slight grade to the gravel path, which keeps me as far from cars as possible. It’s just over six miles to the trailhead and access to more than thirty thousand five hundred acres and over two hundred thirty miles of trails in Scottsdale’s McDowell Sonoran Preserve.
It’s heaven on earth for someone like me.
But getting there takes time, and I have to share the road with cars. Before reaching one of the back roads leading toward the trails, I cut through a quiet private community. I pedal uphill for almost two miles before reaching its gate.
Normally, the gate is closed, and I ride around it on the pedestrian path.
Today it was open.
At the last second, I decided to ride through instead of around. I didn’t think much about it until I entered the mouth of the gate and saw a delivery vehicle coming straight at me.
In that instant, I braced for impact and tried to steer away from its front grille.
The driver slammed on his brakes.
He stopped within an inch of my right leg.
It felt like slow motion. We exchanged shocked looks. I realized I was holding my breath as I rode around him.
I raised my hand. “Dude, I’m so sorry. My fault.”
He rolled down his window. I unclipped my right cleat and put my foot down.
“I’m really sorry. That was completely my fault. I know that’s a crappy way for you to start your day. Forgive me, okay?”
“It’s all good, man. I’m glad I got the brakes in time. Have a blessed day.”
We waved goodbye, and I pedaled north.
I’ve ridden these streets, back roads, trails, and small mountains on different bicycles for almost forty years. Today was the closest encounter I’ve ever had with a car while riding them.
For the rest of my twenty-two-mile ride, I replayed the scene countless times.
Within minutes, I was overwhelmed with tears.
Not tears of fear. Tears of joy, gratitude, and relief.
I wondered again how I was still here.
Then, as the tears dried in the cool desert air, a little anger began bubbling up. I noticed it because my solar plexus started heating up as if somebody had installed a ballistic missile in there.
I’m happy to report I’ve done enough inner work to know not to launch those missiles anymore. They’re deadly for my karma.
You see, my body keeps score.
So does yours.
My nervous system was remembering another morning more than twenty years ago when a man driving a Lexus hit me from behind while I was riding my bicycle in another private, gated community.
It was early morning. Almost nobody was on the road. I was soft-pedaling downhill at nearly thirty miles per hour when the driver deliberately turned his car into me, according to three cyclists riding behind him.
His passenger-side mirror slammed into my left arm. Then the side of his car somehow clipped my saddle and launched me into the air.
I still don’t know how I kept the bicycle upright. Had I crashed at that speed, I could have been seriously injured or killed.
The adrenaline surge made me feel superhuman. I shifted into my biggest gear and hammered the pedals after him.
Picture a skinny, furious cyclist in dorky shorts trying to chase down a Lexus.
I was pissed.
He made it through the gate before I caught him. The cyclists behind me pulled up, including a guy I knew named Corky. One of them was already calling the police.
The officers responded quickly and found the driver at the end of the street. They brought him back.
In the end, they didn’t ticket the driver. No citation. No arrest.
The officers wrote an incident report, gave us copies, and left.
I was incredulous.
And angry.
I stayed angry far too long.
I carried a huge resentment toward that man. I even took it upon myself to knock on his door one morning so we could “talk about it.”
Yeah, right.
I’m not a fighter. I’m a lover. I suck at fighting, and the only time I’ve been punched hard in the head, I saw enough stars to learn that winning friends and influencing people is generally wiser than being a smart-ass who gets punched in the head.
The man didn’t answer his door. Instead, he called the police and taunted me from inside.
I walked away. The last thing I wanted was legal trouble—or to see the inside of a jail again.
Looking back, I was being a fool. I was resentful and didn’t yet have enough tools to talk myself out of doing something stupid.
The injustice bothered me most.
How dare he hit me?
Life isn’t fair. Sometimes life sucks. Big time.
We can learn from these experiences and grow, or we can carry them around with us.
For years, I carried that one. I remembered it this morning like it was yesterday.
Personal growth, or becoming a better human, was the real lesson.
I was one of the actors in the scene. My part was Bicycle Guy. Then Victim. Perhaps I really was the victim that morning.
But I didn’t have to keep playing him.
The resentment became toxic. Learning to let it go was liberating.
And I had plenty of other resentments to release. That’s because resentment is only one form of energy we carry in our bodies. Fear, shame, grief, anger, humiliation, and loss can all leave their fingerprints.
The body remembers.
Our job, as I see it, is to wake up and understand how mind, body, and soul can become aligned while we’re attending this school I call life.
Man, it can be brutal down here. But it can also be unbelievably beautiful.
Like this morning, as the sun rose over the desert and I realized I was still healthy enough to pedal twenty-two miles through it.
Still breathing, learning. Here.
I’ve spent years shedding buckets of family, life, and self-induced trauma. Along the way, I learned an important distinction.
Trauma isn’t simply what happens to us. It’s also what happens inside us after something overwhelming happens—the emotional, biological, and psychological imprint that can remain long after the danger has passed.
One book that helped me understand this was psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score.
Published in 2014, the book helped broaden understanding of how traumatic experiences can continue affecting the brain, body, emotions, and behavior for years afterward.
The mind may say, “That happened twenty years ago.”
The body sometimes answers, “It feels like yesterday.”
Van der Kolk spent decades working with people affected by trauma, beginning with Vietnam veterans early in his career. His work helped me understand something I could feel on my bicycle this morning: remembering danger is not purely an intellectual experience. The nervous system can react before our thinking mind has even figured out what is happening.
I never fought in a war. But like most people who have lived long enough, I’ve had my share of experiences that left marks.
Some were caused by other people.
Some were caused by life.
And plenty were caused by me.
Aging with gratitude doesn’t mean pretending those things didn’t hurt. It doesn’t mean calling injustice good or suffering pleasant.
It means refusing to spend the rest of our lives imprisoned by what happened yesterday.
This morning, a delivery driver stopped one inch from my leg. Twenty years ago, another driver hit me.
One memory could have ruined my morning. Instead, it reminded me how grateful I am to still be here.
I kept pedaling.
Maybe that’s what healing looks like. And maybe that’s what aging with gratitude looks like, too.
We remember.
We learn.
We let go.
And if we’re lucky, we keep pedaling.
I’m grateful for it all.