Fixing the Flat Tires of Our Lives

Now that I feel more settled in my life and my career, I am itching to get back to doing some of the things that I used to do as a kid.  One of those things is to ride a bike more.  The ultimate fantasy is to ride the bike to work, assuming I can overcome my fear of riding alongside Los Angeles drivers such as myself.

Another obstacle for me in riding the bike for any considerable distance has been worrying about what I would do if the bike broke down on the road.  It used to be this nebulous, vague cloud of uncertainty and worry.  The first step in addressing this is to gain more clarity and focus.  And I realized the main, real fear that is addressable is what I would do if have a flat tire on the road.  (I have lots of other fears, some are unreal and some are unfixable on the road even if they are real.)  An opportunity came up this weekend for me to learn how to address this, and I hopped to it.

It was a two hour class, and the instructor has the patience of a kindergarden teacher.  It turns out that once you get the inner tube out of the tire, identifying and patching the flat is pretty easy.  I had forgotten that the part that is intimidating for me and and hard to articulate explicitly was not knowing how to remove the wheels from the frame, especially the rear wheel that is attached to the chain assembly.  And perhaps a bigger concern is that I would put the wheels and brakes back on in the wrong way and that the wheels would go flying off at the most inopportune time.  Perhaps when I am going down a gnarly hill.

And this got me thinking about enjoying life in general.  How often do we hold back from enjoying the good things of life that have some element of real but fixable problems because we don't know how to deal with them when they arise?  And how the real obstacles is often not the problem itself, such as patching the flat tire, but to have the knowledge, confidence, and guidance in to properly take things apart and then put them back together.