Those who don’t know will talk about it, whilst those who do know can’t find the words to describe it…

My wife says that I talk rubbish. And she is right! It is only when I am lost for words that I really know what I am on about.

Like the morning when I was flat on my back on the kerbside lane of the Hume Highway with a semi trailer bearing down on me…and just watching the front wheel of my crashed bike lazily spinning around. Also, just like smacking into the back of a van one early morning and destroying my bike…then waking up in emergency at Concord Hospital as cold as a snapper in the Pyrmont fish markets.

I cannot find the right combination of words (or even the appropriate words) to describe those experiences. Yet, I know what it means to be that close. Once you have been there, you just know. And no amount of teachings can prepare you for the real thing.

Intellectually, we can collect vast amounts of information. Even though it may pay off in trivial pursuit, it only constipates the flow of meaningful experiences.

“To know and not to do is not yet to know.” – Zen Wisdom

There seems to be a universal comment by us Baby Boomers that the Y generation is the perfect example of “…thinking they know it all – yet are just in the beginning of their journey into real knowing”. The Y generation have all the information on just about anything on their fingertips – yet we know that we used to think we knew everything when we were young and computers were items of science fiction. Now we know better. We have lived through actual experiences that we just read about in our youth. Nothing substitutes experience.

Much as we would like to protect our younger generation by teaching, mentoring, setting rules, censorship … and doing their homework, we have to just let them go through their own path of experiences. When they tell you that they know it all, resist the temptation to show them different.

Firstly because you (despite your advancing years), actually know very little. And secondly, words can never convey the essence of knowing…

Talk is cheap. Action needs no words to describe. Just like Tom Boonen and Paris-Roubaix 2012.