Ride Through the Puddles

A few weeks ago I rode in a family mountain biking event in Sabie which had many water puddles along the route due to rain the previous day. While riding I noticed that the kids participating always rode through the puddles while adults avoided them like the plague, including myself. I watched the anticipation on the kids faces before steering their bikes straight through the middle of the puddle and thereafter the pure joy in their eyes and grins on their faces. I felt a pinch of jealousy, even some envy, I wanted that feeling, I wanted that grin on my face! I tried in vain to ride through the puddles, all I could think about was all the things that could go wrong and the mess on my clothing and bike that would need to be cleaned. I was overcome with sadness, I had lost my inner child.  I was this tight assed killjoy adult. I wanted my inner child back, I wanted that grin on my face!

We spend our whole lives experiencing stuff from which we build little rule engines in our minds which determine our future decisions. We slowly block out the wonder with consequences and fears. We stick with the known and avoid the unknown, we become, dare I say it, killjoy's. We wonder why we are no longer as happy as we were as children and seek answers in self help books, religion, living through our children and who knows what else. We take comfort in the fact that we are no longer children but mature adults now.

I have never liked the idiom "To have one's cake and eat it too",  so I for one, would like to be a childult i.e a mature adult who experiences childhood joy. From now on I challenge myself to ride through the puddles.

Viva 2011 (Happy New Year)

I have not written for many weeks now, because I just did not feel like it. Have you ever experienced that? Every time  I thought to myself  that I have not written, I would just change my thoughts, almost like I did not want to think about it.  I wonder what other thoughts I deliberately not think about, but will leave this for another blog.

First I would like to welcome the new year and I look forward to all the exciting  experiences it will bring. I wish you all, the best year yet.

Well this morning, during my morning routine of reading emails, facebook and other blogs, I felt compelled to write this blog about why I started writing in the first place. Ever since I was a very young, I think around 7 or 8, I wanted to be a writer. In fact I wrote my first fictional story when I was only 10. Throughout my schooling years I enjoyed writing but only when something inside of me poured forth. That is really the only way I can describe my writing experience. It is not a deliberate act, I cannot write when I choose to and believe me I have tried. My mind becomes completely blank and all my thoughts are about the fact that I have no thoughts which  quickly starts to loop infinitely, so I break out before insanity reigns or at least I hope so. But when the writing feeling erupts within me, it flows out of me and I cannot write or type fast enough (I should invest in a dictaphone). I wrote mainly poetry or essays which I have never shared with anyone except the occasional love poem I wrote for someone. Unfortunately I have discarded all my writing from over the years and in fact during my University years I stopped writing all together. I am not sure why?

Thorughout the years I always believed that some time in the future I would start writing again, but that future is just not arriving. So finally I started a book which I am still writing and hoping to finish before my worldly departure. I then started a blog called Ahmed On IT which still exists but is pretty much dormant and finally I started Thingz that Matter, which really is meant to be my thoughts made explicit, a place where the writer in me is free to express himself whenever he feels the need to. So I hope the writer in me would make more regularly appearences in 2011 but can make no promises.

Till next we our minds meet......