How A Truck Saved My Life
The journey is over — 12 days of cycling around Taiwan, and now it’s time to return to the quiet and comfortable life waiting for me at home. A life where I don’t spend 10 hours a day on a bike, pushing through 100 kilometers at a time. But after this trip, I’ve come to realize something profound.
I’ve discovered that while I’m physically strong, my mind is fragile, easily swayed by discomfort, almost like a mental illness. In the beginning, I saw my strength — sometimes even surpassing the 15 and 17-year-olds in our group. On flat ground and downhill, I was unstoppable, yet the moment we hit an uphill, I was left in their dust. I spent the first five days puzzled by this, until I realized the truth: I always slow down when faced with an uphill challenge. I give up the moment I feel tired or bored. This mirrors my life — always taking the easy way out, choosing fun and games over the hard, steady work it takes to achieve something great.
But cycling is different from using your mind. With your mind, you have the choice to engage or not. On a bike, with people in front of and behind you, there’s no choice. You must keep going. It’s either push forward or fall behind, risking not only solitude but possibly causing a crash. This, I realized, is how you build willpower. For me, that’s incredibly difficult, because I’ve never had much willpower to begin with, never had once sweat, bled and cried tears for something I wanted.
Everything changed on the 11th day, the day I almost lost my life. I was pushing hard uphill, trying desperately to keep up, teetering on the edge of giving up when the guy in front of me suddenly braked. I did too, expecting the person behind me to follow suit. But instead, he crashed into me, sending me sideways just as a giant truck sped by. The truck’s wheel hit me, knocking me to the ground. I was left with minor injuries and a paralyzing realization.
In that split second when the truck hit, my mind raced through a lifetime of regrets: “This is it. I’m dead. What a shame — I never really lived. No job, no success, no organized life. I never resolved my issues, never gained my mom’s trust, never made the most of my time.” In that half-second, my brain went into overdrive, and I realized something: I regretted my life up to that moment, but I didn’t want it to end. I wanted to live, and I wanted to make my life better. That was my biggest awakening during this trip.
I now understand that I need to change, to live without regret, because tomorrow isn’t guaranteed. If I had fallen a little more to the side, I might not be here to reflect on these things — I could be in heaven, hell, or worse, alive but unable to truly live. That moment made me appreciate life for what it is, not just how I see it.
For a fleeting moment, I felt like I had lost everything, yet at the same time, I felt like I had gained everything. It’s a strange sensation, realizing that sometimes letting go is better than holding on. You have to discard what’s unnecessary and cherish what truly matters. That’s the path to success.
This trip taught me that happiness doesn’t come easy — it’s the result of hard work. Often, happiness is delayed, and when it arrives, it can feel fleeting. Climbing uphill brings pain, and the downhill ride rarely rewards you equally. You have to work twice as hard as the joy you eventually receive. But if you’re willing to put in the effort, to keep pushing even when it’s hard, you can reach a point where the rewards become limitless. Also one of my realizations was that the whole reason why I was so quick to give up on something was that whenever my mom saw that I was tired of something I did like making music, she deemed that as that I didn’t like doing it. But in fact, I realized, I did like those things, just like we would complain and get tired to cycling, but we still love it and want to do it, even though we might not seem that way, so we shouldn’t we so quick in determining how we feel because it might be only the spur of the moment and not the big picture.
The only shadow over this trip was being called a ‘Filthy Communist’ because I’m Mainland Chinese. The 17-year-old weren’t just joking around — they were serious and pushed me away, labeling me as a communist. It was the only one true negative experience I had, but luckily I realized that only some people younger than 30 and older than 15 are like this, people younger than 15 are too kind to be racist and people over 30 are too mature to be racist. But still, it taught me different ways people act instead of only living in Thailand.
But in the end, despite the pain, the struggles, and the insults, I truly enjoyed this journey. It changed my perspective. It showed me that I’m not as strong as I thought, but also that I have the power to become stronger. I learned the true meaning of hard work and reward, and gained willpower. After all, as the teacher said, if we can do something this painful, not really much in our lives are that much harder right now. Of course, these are phrases I heard a long time ago, but until this trip they were only phrases. These are the lessons that shape a person’s understanding — lessons you can’t just learn from a few words and have to experience yourself to really know them, and just like that I can feel the phrases now and that is why next year I hope to go again in 2025 and maybe with another year of life I would learn even more, who knows, after all life is just like an upward slope, you never know what is over that slope until you are there.
