Broken Bikes

I often talk about how experience is the most important thing ever for self-direction. To take it a little out of the realm of theory, I want to share a recent experience that I think will help me down the line.

Last Friday was supposed to be a pretty exciting day. Right after work I was going to be doing a huge bike ride, followed by a Blues dance at 8. Given the rest of the week being bad for various reasons, I was seriously looking forward to everything.


I got out of work and immediately biked over the meeting point. six of my other friends were there, and we set off with everybody else. Then, about ten minutes after we start, my front brake snaps. I immediately pull off the street and get down to fix it.


One problem: I don't know anything about bikes. I can change a tire and unjam a gear, but that's about it. I spend two hours staring and tinkering with the bike, trying to figure out what the heck is going on. To make matters worse the only tool I have is a wrench. Oh, and my false tooth falls out halfway through. That hurts a bit.


After finally working out how to fix the bike, I manage to get the brakes half working. I need special tools or two extra people in order to get them proper. It's already 8:00 now and I'm missing the dance. I try to find it, but because I'm far from the biking stop point I'm a little lost. I get more lost trying to find it, and by 8:30 I give up and bike back to the city.


Okay, so what does this have to do with experience? The lessons I'm learning from this are:


1) If you're not prepared everything can change from "awesome" to "terrible" in the span of a few seconds, and 
2) How to fix a brake.


The second lesson is a little more immediately useful. Hey, it's a new skill. Friday was incredibly frustrating and stressful, but that's in the past now. If the same thing happens in the future, I'll be prepared to handle it. It's also now a lot more obvious to me that I need to know my bike inside and out, so that a similar problem doesn't floor me either.


The first lesson, though, is gonna take a little longer to internalize. I didn't even realize the brakes could snap like that. How do I prepare for the unknown? I think a better thing to take away is that even if things spiral out like this, it's always recoverable. It could take a few hours to get back on track, but at least I will get back on track, and I'll learn something out of it.


If you asked me before the ride "hey, do you want your brakes to snap and you learn how to fix them", I would say "hell no". If you asked me now "hey, do you want to have it so your brakes never snapped and you never learned how to fix them", I'd probably say "no" again, although I don't know how I'd handle the temptation.  I think that's a really interesting comment on how we make choices: even if we know something is better for us in the long run, and we'll be glad it happened once its over, we'll still refuse to choose it.