A few years back a couple of friends and me decided to cycle a well known UK route called the C2C. As the name suggests it goes from sea to sea. In this case, from Whitehaven to Sunderland. We packed up our bikes with tents, food and other essentials and set off on the 4 day trip across the land, camping by night. It is possible to do the trip in one day if you are very fit, but we were not, and the additional weight of carrying what we needed to camp etc., slows you down, hence the 4 days. It was relative hardship compared to ordinary daily life, peddling our way across the Cambrian mountains, through sunshine, rain, fog and hail. The aches and pains of leaning on the handle bars, the bruising and soreness on your backside, revealing themselves more assertively each morning as you start the next leg of the journey, make for discomfort that us pansy-ass townies are really not at home with. Additionally, the late night sounds of your mates snoring and what I can only describe as half-goat-half-pig-half-goose mating grunts at 3 am in the morning, eminating from perhaps 20 feet away, amongst other strange noises, leaves you tired if not exhausted each morning. But still, we got on our bikes and peddled. On the upside, you see the country from a completely different perspective. You start to enjoy the rolling hills and peaks, at least when you're coming down them. You encounter people in a new context too. Folk are helpful, friendly and sympathetic to your quest, perhaps to some degree wishing it was them. By the end of the trip we were truly exhausted, though simultaneously elated at our small achievement, and enriched by the experiences along the way. But, something else had happened to us. We didnt want to stop. We didn't want to go home. We wanted more. What and why?
There was a comradery that developed, despite sleep loss and fatigue induced grumpy exchanges, that I have not experienced in daily town life. Something about the shared hardships and joys that creates unspoken bonds that we don't experience in modern life, save perhaps within the family home, but even then there is something different about this. There was more than just the bonds that made the experience so memorable and precious.
If we step back and look our lives and peer down from a larger perspective there are hints at why. We are constrained by having to pay for our homes and life in them, which forces us to take paying jobs, with our homes creating physical barriers to all outside the four walls. So for the most part of our lives we are either in our homes or in the place of work doing work, where the opportunities for the kind of experiences and comradery I'm talking about do not really exist. Furthermore we are bombarded constantly by marketing, everywhere, it is even piped directly into our homes courtesy of the box in the corner of the room. It teases us, manipulating our desires and emotions, making us addicted consumers of products, somehow dulling our brains to the fact that we are forced to pay all of our lives to live on a tiny patch of our own planet. The bricks and mortar having been paid for just a few years into our mortgages, and the rest just pampering the rich who hold our planet hostage. In this sense we are slaves to the rich. We are forced to live within their laws and ideologies, and skillfully manipulated and coerced into accepting this way of life.
Out on the road, we discovered something about freedom and friendship that is difficult to find or experience within the highly structured system of modern life that is imposed on us. Perhaps the fact that being on bikes, relatively unconstrained by road laws, allowing us to go just about anywhere also had something to do with it. I can't even adequately describe the meaning and joy of what we discovered. It is only something that can be appreciated by embarking on such adventures I think. But it changed me. It continues to change me. Every time I do something outside of the norms of the system now I feel that freedom and joy, and it's addictive. More and more I reject modern life; it's fakery, the celebrities, the rules, the slavery. And I feel good about it.
We can't continue our existing way of life. We already know it. The exhaustion of resources, the damage to our ecology, the wars that will probably ensue, the biological hazards, the nuclear hazards. If the constraints of wage slavery and these mentioned threats are not enough to compel you to change your existence, your existence will change anyway. The question is, do you want it to be on your own terms or are you going to let the terms of others, specifically the rich and powerful, be imposed on you?
My experiences have taught me that there is a much more fulfilling existence for us, waiting for us, beyond the walls of this fake life imposed on us by the rich. It will involve work too, but not this meaningless 'existance' as servants. We have to fight for our rights and freedoms, and that takes comradery and solidarity that doesn't come from ordinary modern life. You can experience it on an adventure, in protests and demonstrations, through participating in life with fellow ordinary folk. It creates meaning for your life that you wont find on your TV, in the supermarket or at work, but you have to seek it out to understand it. As the famous anarchist Rosa Luxembourg once said "those who do not move do not feel their chains", and that is something we cannot truly grasp whilst continuing to go through the motions of the life that has been designed for us by the rich for the rich.
Do something you have never done. Do something beyond normality. Understand what the word liberty means, and how we give it up by continuing with modern life. Become addicted to freedom and learn how to fight for it.
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