Mahatma Gandhi once said,
"There are two types of power in the world:
the first obtained for the fear of punishment,
and the second through acts of love."
He believed in love as a force for change,
and that any power obtained through the fear of punishment was weak,
temporary, corrosive to the human spirit,
whereas that power enacted through the acts of love
was 1,000 times more effective.
And better yet, permanent.
I felt that power of love from my father
the first time he taught me how to ride a bicycle.
His love took the form of patience.
I recall how he gently ran beside me holding, steadying, pushing,
gently encouraging me to trust in what he knew was inside of me.
I must have failed 100 times.
But then came that moment, as if by some act of magic,
my tires righted for the first time.
And I remember as this young child
feeling as if I was floating in flight through the heart of a neighborhood.
And for that moment, all the things that hung heavy in my young heart,
all the things my young mind couldn't understand,
my parents late-night fights,
their crumbling marriage, the slow-moving disease
that crept through my mother's body,
all of it seemed to disappear that first afternoon.
And so it was not long after that that I began a ritual of my own.
It began each day after school
as I'd hurriedly make my way to my bicycle,
grab it from the rack, pedal across my neighborhood,
push it beneath the fence,
and then cycle deep into the heart of a nearby wildlands
in the east of the San Francisco Bay area.
And it was there that I found solace.
Simply peddling over dirt, through the forest and the trees,
because there was something in that simple act of motion
atop that equally simple machine of rubber and steel
that brought me back to myself.
And in that I was free.
But then my life changed as all lives must.
And within two years, my parents had argued so much,
my father moved out of the house, and I lost interest in that bike.
And as it sat dormant collecting dust in some remote corner of the garage,
my mother died in the midst of a bitter divorce.
Needless to say, as I was first thrust out in the world as a young man,
I spent the first decade of my life angry,
bitter, hurting myself, hurting others,
the power of love nowhere to be found.
But then my father returned to my life.
He said to me, "I understand.
I felt that loss, too.
And I needed to talk to somebody.
Perhaps you should think about that as well."
Six months later, I sat before a psychotherapist.
"I think I'm crazy," I said to her.
I thought she'd have me committed.
Instead, she looked at me with warm, empathetic eyes, and she said,
"Rick, the ones who are truly crazy in this world
are the ones who are trying very hard to convince you that they're not."
That was the beginning of my healing path.
And for the next three years, I dug deeply into myself,
sometimes looking at parts I didn't want to see.
But after that three-years period, there came what some people call
a moment of clarity, a tipping point, if you will,
at which I was able to ask myself one of life's most important questions:
what do you want before you die?
What is your dream?
I had worked 14 years as a daily newspaper photographer,
and I knew one thing for sure: that career was no longer feeding me.
I had had a larger dream.
I had always dreamed of riding a bicycle around the world.
And so within a two-year period of time,
I found myself sitting on the top of the Golden Gate Bridge on my bike,
saying goodbye to friends and family, riding 4,000 miles across America.
I pedaled in America 4,000 miles there, and moved on to Europe
where I spent eight months cycling through the coldest winter in European record.
From there, I went south through Greece and into Turkey.
I was denied a visa to come into Iran
so I continued through Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, China,
18,000 feet over the Tibetan Plateau, and down into India,
Nepal, and Bangladesh.
It was there that I began to see something different
from the seat of my bicycle:
suffering on a level that I had never seen before.
And only then did I learn the second power of love,
the first being the care of self, and the second to allow that
to be reflected outwards, towards service to others.
I began volunteering in the time off my bike.
The first, the hardest, was comforting
the dead and dying in an aid hospice in Thailand.
That was followed by bomb extraction work
in Laos alongside these gentlemen
that extract bombs and keep them from killing anybody else.
I followed that up in Vietnam by working alongside mine victim rehabilitation
and then taught English to impoverished children in Cambodia.
But the reason I'm here today
is to tell you about what happened just after that.
I was cycling south through Thailand,
and I met this gentleman, an Iranian from Mashhad, Iran.
We corresponded by email for a while.
Mohammed Tajaran was his name.
He invited me to come to Penang, Malaysia.
Pretty soon, I was sitting having coffee and lunch with him.
We agreed we'd ride together across Malaysia,
across Malaysia's main range, one of the oldest rainforests in the world.
And as we rode side by side, I asked him about his life.
What he told me was profound.
He told me, his father had died when he was young,
and that he'd done everything right in his life;
that he got his degree in engineering, opened a successful business.
But then as he was climbing a mountain one day,
he realized that it just wasn't right.
And so, he began to plan for a journey.
For him, he had a dream to cycle around the world.
And as he got ready to do that, he learned English,
and then he just set out with 500 bucks in his pocket.
Well, that afternoon, what I realized
was this man was telling my story.
That was my story.
And I thought to myself: here was this man that people were saying,
this is your enemy, when, in fact, I had more in common with this man
than I had with many of my friends back home.
After the end of our ride,
into the east coast of Malaysia, we dug a hole.
He was riding around the world planting trees.
And we decided to plant a tree together, for peace,
a tree that still remains and grows for peace
between our two countries, America and Iran.
(Applause)
And when I said goodbye to Mohammed, I told him that I loved him.
I began to weep because I was sorry that our two countries
were hurling a warlike rhetoric at one another.
They were not acting from the power of love,
but they were acting from this power
they hope to attain through threats of punishment.
And so, over the years that I didn't see Mohammed,
we developed a second program project called "The Wheels of Peace".
And instead of explaining that to you,
I'd like to invite him out here to explain it to you himself.
Mohammed, are you in there somewhere? He got lost on his bike somewhere.
Where are you Mohammed? He's shy.
He doesn't want to come out now.
Mohammad, are you back there?
I don't know what happened.
(Applause)
Mohammed Tajaran: I've been waiting so long for this moment
to hug one of my best friends in front of a crowd in my country, in Iran.
I'm so excited, so emotional now.
"Wheels of Peace" is a project
to connect kids from two different nations.
They're like two wheels of a bicycle, totally dependent on each other.
If one doesn't work, the other one would fail.
Rick and I are just like a frame trying to connect them through our force,
our letters and exchanging those letters.
A letter to understand
they have the same values in the whole system.
In the same way, in our world,
peace is related to the peace of every single nation.
As Saadi said,
"Human beings are members of a whole, in creation of one essence and soul.
If one member is afflicted with pain, other members uneasy will remain."
RG: And so Mohammed and I visited classrooms in Iran and America.
Each one of us would collect artwork and letters
to be exchanged by the children.
Then we met in-- I can't say the word,
Kish Island, just next door last year.
And we brought that artwork and those letters together.
And I guess the thing that I want to finish with is:
what did you learn from all of this?
And you know, I think it's something that all of you already know;
that in our approach every day, moment to moment,
we have a choice to operate from what Gandhi spoke of,
to operate from that place of love or to operate from that place of fear.
And so, for me personally, I think you know the choice,
I think you know the choice for Mohammad.
But we'll be gone soon enough in so many years,
and we have the next generation coming.
So I'd like to share with you what they had to say
to one another with their art and with their letters.
[What did the children of America and Iran have to say to one another?]
(Video) (Music)
[I love you my friend!]
[Aren't we all humans, then why can't we live in peace?]
[Love]
[me and you, friends forever]
[Friends]
[No more war]
[Iran, America, Peace]
[No war, more peace]
[Love is the only force capable of turning an enemy into a friend." Dr.MLK Jr.]
(Applause)
RG: Thank you.
MT: Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.
(Applause)