Ride Every Ride

A good friend of mine, Carrie, is going through one of those awful workplace situations where everything feels uncertain. There are rumors of layoffs, shifting roles, and the kind of tension that makes it hard to focus on anything else. She and her coworkers are understandably stressed. But Carrie has adopted a mantra that I love: Ride every ride.

Picture yourself at an amusement park at the start of a beautiful summer day. The gates have just opened, the lines are short, and the whole day stretches ahead of you. You want to ride every ride, don’t you? You don’t want to go home wondering what you missed.

That’s what Carrie is doing right now. Instead of waiting anxiously for the next announcement, she’s taking advantage of every opportunity in front of her - every training session, every chance to meet new colleagues, every perk the company offers. If the ride is open, she’s getting on it.

I thought of Carrie’s mantra again today when I had lunch with a former client, Jessie, who has become a friend (it’s one of the perks of our job – sometimes a client becomes a dear friend).

Jessie was widowed about six years ago. She and her husband had a great marriage. They were the kind of couple who built their life side by side. When he died, the loss knocked the wind out of her. For about a year, she says, she was in shock. She went through the motions of daily life, but she can’t really tell you how she got through that time. She just did.

And then, after about a year of this, something shifted.

She decided she was going to start saying yes to things. She accepted invitations to celebrate holidays with neighbors, she started working with a personal trainer, she learned to paint.

She was retired and didn’t need a job, and she didn’t want the structure of one. But she knew she wanted to do something meaningful with her days, so she began volunteering at the hospice house where her husband had spent his final days. The people there had supported her through the hardest time of her life, and she wanted to be part of that support for someone else.

Now she spends her time sitting with families who are in the place she once was. They are stunned, exhausted, and unsure how they will ever feel normal again. She doesn’t give speeches or offer grand advice. Mostly, she is just there with them. A quiet reminder that life does not end with grief, even when it feels that way.

At lunch today, as she talked about the past six years, I realized she was living Carrie’s mantra without ever having heard it.

She’s riding every ride.

When I said that to her, her whole face lit up. “Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly how I feel.”

It’s so easy to get bogged down in the routines and worries of daily life. There are errands to run, dogs to walk, emails to answer, bills to pay, problems to solve. The days fill up without us even noticing how they went.

And fun, real fun, the kind that makes life feel bigger, it’s easy to postpone.

We tell ourselves we’ll do that later: When things calm down, when work is less busy, when life feels more certain.

But the truth is, life rarely feels certain. The rides don’t stay open forever.

Sometimes the best thing we can do is step forward, get in line, and take the ride while we can.