Bike Riding - It Isn't All Water

When I was in kindergarten or thereabouts, I was taught to ride a bicycle.  I do not write that I learned to ride a bike although I eventually did.  I was taught to ride a bike. I did not particularly have any inclination to learn this skill at the time; I was told I had to. For some reason it was required. I have the idea that my teacher was my dad, but I have a suspicion that my mom was also involved. 

We lived in a small town, and our house was fortuitously across the street from a small church with a small paved parking lot that had a small patch of gravel near it with a small bit of grass beyond that. There was a significant bump riding into the lot from the street.

As I was coerced into learning this skill, a parent held on to the back of the white banana seat of the purple two-wheeler with a white basket decorated with colorful plastic flowers, and as soon as said parent decided I’d mastered balance, parent would let go, and I would promptly fall over.  My recollection is that the parent(s) in question got fed up and told me to stay in the parking lot until I could ride the bike. 

I did.  I don’t remember how long it took, but I learned to balance, to avoid the gravel patch, not to go careening into the grass, and I may have even pulled the lever on the handlebar bell a few times.  Soon, I abandoned the parking lot for the street, up and down, to my friend Melinda’s house.

David Foster Wallace gave the commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005 in which he asserted that our monotonous adult lives all depend upon how we view that monotony.  We have the choice, he asserted, to be annoyed, or we can simply see our daily experiences, like a grocery store or a traffic jam, as “water” – the stuff daily life is made of.  And, he further suggested that we have the choice of how we view the water.  We can view people and the annoyances of life in any number of ways, and it is incumbent upon us to consciously choose how we encounter life. 

True enough.  However, I would go on to say, that one needs to view life, its people, and its situations for what they are; not everything is water.  There is gravel, heavy traffic, and big bumps.  It's not all the same.

Some of life’s experiences involve people making you do things you don’t really want to do.  We all have tasks that we must do on a daily basis at the behest of others.  Riding the bike.  We can whine or bitch about it, but adult life demands that we do some things that we just plain don’t want to do.  If we are lucky, we have parents or mentors who teach us to balance as we are getting started.

As we are riding that daily life bike, we may encounter paved patches.  We can manage quite well on these.  Some of us may find our patches a little small and strike out to find larger patches to navigate.  Still, no matter how big your paved road of daily tasks is, there are always some gravel spots.  Those must be ridden on or around.  The grass beyond must be respected.

Thinking that all the roads we are riding on are the same, might just land us unconscious on the side of the road with a concussion.  Navigating daily adult life is more than just saying “this is water” and making a conscious effort to encounter life thoughtfully.  This navigation also demands that we recognize our surroundings for what they are, keep our balance, and steer as needed. 

Once we get the hang of the riding and navigating, we can, occasionally, ring our handlebar bell.  The analogy is stretching bit, but my point comes down to this:  it’s not all water.  There are basic tasks, annoying people, extreme stresses, and things to be swerved around.  It behooves us to see what we are riding on.  It’s not all water, and if we acknowledge the people or situations for what they really are, then, perhaps we become expert riders.