ON YER BIKE!!!
“Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.” H. G. Wells (Novelist, Journalist, Sociologist and Historian)
It is a sad state of affairs to complete childhood without the ability to ride a bicycle.
I should know, I managed to complete childhood and a couple of phases of adulthood without the skill. I never could learn how, a simple task that a small child could accomplish had defeated me. However bicycle riding is the great metaphor for success, being that it takes some perseverance to overcome the problem of balance. I cannot tell you how disheartening it is to have Albert Einstein’s famous quote (aligning any task that takes will and effort with bicycle riding) paraphrased at you… worse still be told that any skill you may have forgotten will come back to you…’just like riding a bicycle’. Fact was… I couldn’t ride a bike.
I had just about come to terms with this anomaly, when as part of the great task that is child raising, the time came to each my son to ride a bike. I have to admit this was a task I farmed out to someone more suitably qualified, but watching the process revealed a great truth to me. A shaky child on a bicycle for the first time needs both support and freedom. Support to feel he won’t fall… and Freedom to do just that… and not be scared.
Within moments he peddled away in self propelled joy… and I realised that there was a lesson in the process for both of us somewhere.
Freedom and Support are the two key ingredients for a successful life. Too much of either and you are doomed, too little of either and you can never progress.
A few years later, I found myself in the unenviable position of being a lone parent. Being a lone parent is something the vast majority of people who find themselves in that status attain by default. I know no one personally who had planned to be there. However, once you are, there is little time for navel gazing and wondering how/where it all went awry… you have 2 people’s jobs to do, and the task starts immediately. But again, as the months went on and I went soliciting advice from friends, came the comforting words that if I had got thus far, I could continue… as it was ‘life was just like riding a bicycle… you can’t fall off unless you stop peddling’.
It was of little comfort to me to be made constantly aware that I had never in real life actually started to peddle. I could not self propel a bike – in fact I could only sit on a bicycle if it had stabilisers… and adult stabilisers are NOT a sight to see.
By then my son was 8 and quite and experienced cyclist. He would ride to the park – I would jog out of breath alongside. I had no choice but to sit on a bench and holler instructions for him not to cycle out of my eye line once we got there. (Flo Jo I am not).
Then one day. I asked him.
“Do you think you could teach me?”
So he did. With a patience befitting someone many years his senior, my child revealed a positivity, honesty and perceptiveness I had little idea he possessed. He was observant and sharp, revealing to me what techniques I had for holding up my own progression. I grazed my knuckles to the bone… I flew over the handlebars into a gorse bush (ouch!)… but my little Svengali insisted that I get right back in the saddle. His only reaction when I showed him my wounds was “Cool”. I actually think he WAS jealous!
After a couple of days I learned to balance, stop, start, signal and peddle the bike. As I completed my first circuit (round the tennis courts) – he cheered for me like a proud parent and let all the glory be mine.
It was a seminal moment in our relationship. The child had taught the parent a life skill. Although it was humbling to me to have to ask a child for help, I think it was very good for me. All too often we can forget how much a child has to teach us. In this day and age where if you wish to truly understand a computer for instance, your best teacher would be a 12 year old… it is something we adults are being forced to come to terms with. But it was great to have him succeed where so many others had failed – the child is a natural born teacher!
Also, it meant from that moment on we could enjoy the activity together. We are both several bikes on from that seminal moment in the park… and we are both the scourge of our neighbourhood with our mutual disregard for the laws on cycling on the pavement! It is wonderful to have the locality opened up for us by our mutual skill and to be able to take off on adventures together.
It amazes me how simultaneously liberating self propulsion is… and also how thrillingly dangerous it also is. I now get why it is such a metaphor for life.
Over the past few years of being a cyclist I have learnt that my bicycle does not only propel me to where I need to be… but it does more. It also offers me the thin edge of danger (maybe that is just cycling in Greater London!) but it certainly keeps me alert and comfortably apprehensive.
When balanced precariously on two wheels, everything seems completely different and poses a personal threat. As a pedestrian or motorist you simply glide over a pot hole… on a bike it becomes the launch pad for a flight over the handle bars. As a pedestrian or motorist an unleashed dog is more noticed for its breed or cuteness… on a bike it becomes the unpredictable ball of fur that snap after your coat tails or chase your back wheel. Even freewheeling joyously carries a slight apprehension of how exactly you will control your rapidly gaining speed. And yet for all the anxiety and overwhelming sense of being in control of your own outcomes soothes. On this cycling is just like life: Qualms and terrors of unpredictable change become but a challenge you have to believe you can vanquish as giving up is not an option.
Cycling has taught me to appreciate the journey once more and to arrive knowing that getting there was part of the fun. My bicycle and I have learnt uphill takes mighty effort (even with a mountain bike)… and to do so gives tingling satisfaction. But it was on the saddle of my bicycle that I learnt finding a less challenging route is also a great skill that satisfies also. It taught me that sometimes it pays to ask WHAT is the big hurry? To notice that sometimes time IS on my side, so why take the arduous uphill journey if it is only beneficial because it was the most direct route?
It took several bike rides to and from my parents to understand this. My parents live delightfully downhill of my house. I can get there with ease, the avenues are wide, many have cycling lanes and I freewheel without a care in the world. However taking that route home is like auditioning for a heart attack. I was often spot sweat soaked and pushing the bike up the hill (curse those Romans and their straight lines!). Then it occurred to me that I was putting myself through an arduous uphill struggle simply because I had travelled that way out. I had to ask myself WHY was I coming and going by the same route? I’m not a bus… I don’t HAVE to follow a prescribed way.
So I cycled across the tops of hills that run from my parents to beyond my place. Okay, doing so meant I’d overshot my house by half a mile... but the hill back to my house from there was downward. Flat, Flat Flat… then freewheel! It was whilst taking this route that I discovered that whilst there were no wide avenues or cycle lanes, it was a much prettier and interesting route. On this ‘round the houses’ route an ancient woodland and a sheep farm had to be negotiated.
I’d lived in the area since I was 7, and I had never noticed the sheep farm before. From the road it looks like a clearing in the ancient woodland. I have rocketed past it in cars, on buses and even on foot, maybe giving it a sideways glance and thinking it was a garden centre or a golf course. Of course, cycling across the tops of the hill away from the public thoroughfare meant I could look down… and in. Also allowing myself time to journey rather than travel, meant that I could go and knock on the farmhouse door and ask about it. The owners were really friendly and told me all about their urban farm and invited me to their open day. My son and I both cycled over that day (note to self: Think again about getting bikes over styles… a lot harder than it looks) – the open day was really good fun. Plus in a real surprise they had invited some cowboys from Western Canada to attend who did some entertaining tricks. I found it a bit of a shock that this had been on my doorstep for decades, but I had failed to notice it was there.
But that is the thing about taking the time to try another route. Sometimes you have to do a detour to find something you were never looking for that will bring you great joy.
I used to think that if a mountain was put in front of you… it meant you had to climb it.
But it doesn’t at all. A mountain is put in front of you for you to decide what you wish to do about it. One should bear in mind going up is only about getting to the destination... to choose otherwise is the path of adventure where arrival the destination may well get delayed, postponed or you may not arrival at all. As my bicycle trips have taught me… going up it is just ONE of many possible options.
I totally get it now why a strange wheeled contraption invented only in 1818 has leapfrogged into our language as metaphor for modern living.
It takes a certain amount of courage to even learn to operate the contraption.
It takes the support of someone you trust implicitly to believe in your own courage.
It takes the freedom to be able to break free of that support to propel yourself.
It takes the foresight to see danger and avert it.
It takes the enjoyment in just being alive to enjoy what you have achieved.
And for giving me all of that I would like to thank Baron Karl Drais von Sauerbronn for taking his invention to the Paris show in 1818, and all the inventors who perfected it to the bicycle we know today.
But above all, I would like to thank an 8 year old boy, who took the time out over a spring school holiday to teach his mother at last, how to ride a bike.
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