Who Is Alan Rider?
In a lot of ways, I’m not that unique. I’m not
wealthy, nor am I supremely physically fit. I’m not especially
courageous, and don’t think I have an adrenaline junkie’s
pathological attraction to dangerous activities (though my
wife may disagree on that last point). I’m just a regular
guy who’s always been up for a new adventure.
Unlike a lot of folks, however, my two careers—first
as a disc jockey and, more recently, as a magazine editor and
travel writer—have allowed me to enjoy a long string
of truly extraordinary experiences. From competing in an elephant
race to watching the earth and sky trade places through the
glass canopy of an aerobatic biplane, I’ve been extremely
fortunate to be able to do an awful lot of downright cool stuff.
Still, my life might have remained uninspired and my passion
undiscovered were it not for the wake-up call the Universe
delivered one sunny August afternoon via an elderly gentleman
in a white Oldsmobile Cutlass. Though neither of us realized
it at the time, his split-second decision to run the red light
at the downtown Salt Lake City intersection I happened to be
riding my motorcycle through would transform the way I looked
at the world forever.
After the good folks at the University of Utah Medical Center
literally saved my life, the six months of surgeries and physical
therapy I went through left me with plenty of time to think.
And as I searched for some deeper meaning behind my traumatic
near-death experience, I stumbled across this quote from the
conclusion of Henry David Thoreau’s classic Walden:
"I went to the woods because I
wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential
facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to
teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not
lived."
Those last dozen words leapt off the page at me. And, the
more I thought about them, the more I realized that the only
way to make sense of this unsettling and painful introduction
to my own mortality was to make the conscious decision to live
my life to the fullest from here on out.
And so I’ve created this website
to both allow me to live out my dreams and encourage and inspire
you to do the same. Everything here is designed to remind you
not to relegate all those things you’ve always wanted
to do to that file we all carry around inside our heads labeled “Someday.” Because
I’ve learned from personal experience that Someday may
never come.
If I can help other people to understand
this one fundamental truth that I had to learn the hard way
- that, on their death beds, people never regret what they
did, only what they didn’t do - well, that might
be my most extraordinary experience of all.
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