Riding a Bicycle is Like Riding a Bicycle

I went bike shopping with my kids the other day. Two years ago, we purchased a couple of used bikes off Facebook Marketplace for maybe $50 total. To be honest, these bikes were nearing the end of their life when we got them. They were great first bikes and they most certainly served their purpose. But I promised the boys brand new, hand-chosen bikes for this coming season. They can now ride fully independently, I too love riding bikes, and we now live two blocks from the best bike trail in the state. Needless to say, I’m pumped!

As we were walking through the store, Pax expressed some anxiety about the whole ordeal. “What if I forgot how to ride a bike? What if I can’t do it?” I quickly responded, “it’s like riding a bike.” He stared blankly at me, clearly not understanding my bad joke. You know the expression! Riding a bike is one of those things we quickly pick back up. We can go months or years without riding one, then the moment we hop back on it’s like we never stopped. Call it muscle memory. Call it instinct. Call it magic.

We don’t study to ride a bike, researching the how-tos and techniques for hours on Google and YouTube. We learn to ride a bike by failing to ride a bike. We get on, pedal 20 feet, careen into a ditch, get up, and try it again. Failure after failure, we learn to stay up. Then just like that, we know how to ride. There’s never a moment where we say, “Oh, 5 failures from now I’ll know how to ride it.” We just keep failing until we stop failing. Then we never look back.

Money, work, and life are much the same way. We can research it until the cows come home, but it won’t teach us how to live it. We need to hop on the proverbial bike, scrape our knees, then try again. Each time, we’ll get just a little bit better……until one day we’re soaring down the bike trail of life with the wind in our face and the sun shining down.

Some of you have a bike you’re scared to hop on. You’re terrified of scraping your knees up. You will. You’re nervous you won’t be very good. You won’t be. You think the process will be uncomfortable. It will be. But if you’re willing to get scraped up a few times, you’ll be soaring in no time!

It’s like riding a bike!