This episode is inspired by Elton John & Bernie Taupin
On Memorial Day, I took my first bike ride since the accident, seeking proof that my legs, lungs, and nerves still remembered the road.
There’s a strange kind of magic when the cadence of a ride syncs perfectly with a song you know by heart. Suddenly, the music and lyrics stop being background noise and become a lens.
And through that lens, the road started talking.
I've been cycling on this road some,
Can't help feeling I've been showing my friends around.
I've seen it grow from next to nothing,
To a giant eatin’ up our town.
Called up the tealeaves and the tarots,
Asked the gypsy what she sees in the palm of our hands.
She saw cornfields and wild deer running,
A crazy kid becoming a better man.
But we stuck around for the fireworks,
Waiting to explode.
You became a Tumbleweed
And me a Yellow Brick Road.
We learned to make a living
Selling pieces of ourselves,
An urban soul in a fine wool suit.
And you can't go back.
And if you try, it fails.
Looking up ahead, I see a rusty nail.
A sign hanging from that says: "Truth for Sale."
Somewhere climbing a long grade, somewhere between the burn in my thighs and the familiar pull of the handlebars, I realized something simple and unavoidable: as you get older, your life keeps moving forward whether you’re ready or not.
The road doesn’t pause for nostalgia.
The quiet stretches you remember become crowded intersections. Open land turns into condominiums. Familiar landmarks disappear behind steel, glass, and billboards. You ride through places that once felt permanent, only to discover they’ve become something else entirely.
And so have you.
Retirement, recovery, reinvention—whatever name you give this season of life—begins with one uncomfortable realization: the world changed when you weren’t looking.
You can’t ride backward toward some perfectly preserved version of the past expecting everything to feel the same. The old suits don’t fit quite right anymore. The roads have been rerouted. The people we used to be exist mostly in memory now. Trying too hard to reclaim yesterday can leave you stranded on the shoulder, staring at ghosts. But out there today, breathing hard beneath a widening California sky, another thought arrived just as clearly.
The world is constantly trying to sell us a version of truth. Packaged certainty. Manufactured outrage. Instant wisdom. Subscription model meaning. Every screen, headline, influencer, and algorithm is competing to tell us what matters and who we’re supposed to become. That rusty nail and crooked sign suddenly made perfect sense.
Truth for sale.
But the older I get, the more I believe the truest things in life rarely arrive advertised. They show up quietly:
- In the steady rhythm of an early morning ride.
- In the quiet kindness of people who expect nothing in return.
- Volunteering your time without needing a spotlight.
- In music that somehow understands you better decades later.
- In books, nature, conversation, and shared miles with good friends.
The gypsy may have seen fireworks and highways waiting for us all those years ago, but clarity doesn’t usually arrive in explosions. More often, it reveals itself slowly, one mile at a time, while the wheels keep turning beneath you.
Today wasn’t really about distance or speed. It was about returning.
Returning to the road. Returning to movement. Returning to perspective. And maybe that’s the real gift of getting back on the bike after a fall: you stop searching for certainty and start appreciating motion again. The road ahead may not look like the one we imagined decades ago. The towns are bigger. The signs are louder. The truth is harder to recognize.
But somewhere between the spinning wheels and the fading daylight, clarity still finds us.
So we keep pedaling.
I’m Patrick Ball. Stay curious, ask better questions. See you on the roads.
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