Camera roll exploration 2

While this photo was taken quite recently, making this more an analysis than an exploration, I still find it worth taking a deeper dive into. I feel like there are quite a few things to say about this photo, and I believe the implications (or at least my inferences) of the events it depicts are worth sharing. Thus, without further ado, I present:

The Extreme

Walking home through the Auckland Domain other day, I saw something that left me absolutely bewildered. As I approached the staircase captured in the photo, I bore witness to something incredible, something exciting, something (as the photo's title states) extreme: a man was riding his bicycle down the aforementioned staircase. Now, this subject may be put up for debate, but personally, I would go so far as to say that this staircase is of epic proportions. And to see a man descend down such an epic flight of stairs in such a nonchalant, yet awesome, manner was something that struck a previously untouched chord with me. I tend to think I live a rather exciting life, but there's a chance that I have truly only reached the tip of the iceberg when it comes to thrills. This extreme act was done so casually, with such little regard for how extreme it actually was, that it made me realize that there may be levels of extreme that people live their lives by that I may never be able to achieve. Now, of course I'm aware of the YouTubers who do all the nutty stunts and the people who climb skyscrapers and such, but I always seemed to assume that the echelon of extreme that these people were in was much closer to my own. Seeing this man cruise down the stairs on his bicycle was a reminder that there are quite a few more strata of extreme that I must ascend before I'm even at the threshold for embodying the word itself. Not that I necessarily aspire to reach this level of extreme, but it was definitely nice to have a little bit of a reality-check in terms of how extreme I really am relative to the rest of the world. Maybe one day I can be so extreme that such an act can be smoothly incorporated into my daily life. Until then, I'll say that the challenge I'll issue to myself, and—by virtue of reading this—you as well, is to consider ways in which I could incrementally change my level of extreme, with the ultimate goal being to find myself at the perfect Goldilocks tier, for when one's personal apex level of extreme is reached, true freedom is found.