I'm back from my cycling holiday and feeling so alive and inspired! It's amazing what fresh air and beautiful sights can do for the soul...I even found myself wishing for some Wordsworth or Byron, any Romantic poems, really, because I felt they would make more sense, or speak more truth when read in context in the natural world.
In fact, I would say it was more than a holiday, and that for me it was more like an adventure.
And what an adventure it was....
One thing I loved about this trip was that it was all about the journey - most holidays you jump in the car or on a plane and just wait until you arrive somewhere, but on a bike there is so much pleasure and fun in the journey itself. I would be lying if I said I didn't feel relief or happiness at reaching my destination after hours growing saddle-sore on the bike (that, and muscle pain, are two things that no amount of natural beauty can repair!) But there is no denying that a majority of the time was spent travelling, and a majority of the happiness came from that; it was about freewheeling downhill past farms and fields of cows in the sunshine more than it ever was about reaching the bottom of the hill...
Perhaps that was the reason I was feeling a bit 'blocked' with my writing before I left - I was struggling to write even my blog, and all I could think about was 'I have to write for X, Y, Z reason', whether it was about maintaining regular posts on this blog, wanting to meet a competition deadline or, yes, uni essays with a due date approaching.
I was focussing on the end result so much, I wasn't paying any attention to how I would get there. And thus the journey came to a staggering halt.
So I'll hold on to this inspiration and happiness for as long as I can, and I hope it lasts a long time. But if this feeling eventually dissipates I know now to focus on enjoying the journey, the process of writing, the words, the characters, the conflict - and who knows what different roads I may go down, and the different destinations I may reach if I don't begin by looking for them...
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