I had the lucky chance to get a flat tire while riding my bike to the bank this evening which led to the following three Lightfooted Lessons:

 

1. See the Forrest for the Trees

Before I took off from work, I made a quick mental assessment:

• I was late for a meeting with my financial advisor.
• It was a new bike route to a destination I’d never been before.
• I was extremely tired, having been wide awake at 4am, excited to support the UBC graduation ceremony
• My phone was nearly dead, after tweeting, posting & instagramming graduates all day.
• With no phone meant no Google maps to direct me to this new location.
• It was about to rain and I didn’t have rain gear to keep me warm & dry.

The confluence of these elements added up to a disaster waiting to happen. Anticipating this, I wrote down my banker’s name, address and phone number and left her a voice mail, letting her know I’d be late. I packed a spare set of clothes so if I got soaked I could change out of my spandex at the bank and, most importantly, I gave myself permission to cycle slower than my usual “go hard or go home” speed so I didn’t make poor riding choices while tired and time-crunched.

Seeing the bigger picture here allowed me to take the most useful action without getting emotionally bullied by any one of these factors or buckle under the cumulative weight of these worries.

2. Expect the Unexpected

Five minutes into the ride I knew I had gone too far on the south-west side of the University campus. It was foreign road to me and I had just turned onto a long, busy stretch of Marine Drive. I stopped to confirm this hunch with Google maps and it told me so just before my iPhone gave a final sigh and the screen blinked off. In those precious few seconds of viewing the map, I could see I had overshot King Edward St. but could find it again heading diagonally north-east. Cycling on, I kept looking around for signs and mulling over how to find a side-road exit north when bam! a very solid object on the road made contact with my back tire. Immediately this ol’ cowpoke saying popped into my head:

“Walk a straight line through a cow pasture and you gotta step in some cow pies, but you get where you’re goin’.”

Ah, yes! Here was my preverbal cow patty slowly deflating on the wide open paved pasture. My first flat in three years. There was no other option but to deal with the mess before I got goin’ anywhere again. This seemed the most natural outcome of the evening’s adventure and I felt at peace, almost as if this moment was created just for me for the very reason to practice the next Lightfooted Lesson, which is to:

3. Choose the Most Valuable Reality

This Lesson I recently picked up from one of my heroes, happiness researcher Shawn Achor, in his latest book, Before Happiness (2014). By choosing to focus on the most positive, helpful and valuable elements in your environment you can generate more creative solutions and ideas and delight in the process. At the same time, you lose the need to catastrophize, to jump to the worst case scenario, to generate anxiety and dis-ease.

It would have been so easy to focus on the “noise” around me: I’m so late; I’m so tired; I don’t know where I am; it’s so noisy here on the side of road, pooooooooor me! etc. etc. etc. But I’ve trained myself out of this thinking and instead focused on the following:

• I’m safe. I was conveniently right underneath a big flashing orange sign that signified to drivers to slow down. I was also on a generous bike land and beside a soft, green grassy area to flip my bike up and take off my rear tire.
• I’m prepared. I have a bike repair kit with all the tools I need and a lifetime worth of practice changing a tire.
• I’m surrounded by people who want to help. Cyclist after cyclist hollered out to me as they passed, “You good?” and “You okay?” or “Aright here?”

  “Yep!” I would nod briskly as they whizzed passed. As I assessed my priorities (my safety, my preparedness, my commitments) I realized that I would have to appeal to the kindness of a stranger in order to reach my banker to reschedule.

  My “Yep!” turned into an “Yep..?” and a kindly older gentleman stopped and offered me his phone, once he understood it wasn’t the tire I was worried about. We had a lovely chat and he shared with me that it was his first ride out on his new carbon-kitted bike – now that’s exciting! Had I been in a stressed-out headspace I would have missed this sweet interaction completely.

The outcome of this positive focus and prioritization was that while I got down to the dirty work of changing the tire, memories – the happiest of memories – came flooding in: memories of my dad showing me how to repair my first flat tire; a montage of moments from our epic annual family summer cycling adventures across the Alberta Rockies and over BC Islands, in which many, many flats were had; that time I changed my tire in a torrential downpour in under six minutes; and the joy of being able to share my love of cycling with over a hundred children who attended the week long Kids CAN-BIKE camps from 2007-2009, a pilot program I co-developed and led in Toronto. Passing on the knowledge of how to change a tire, switch a gear or raise a seat was more than just passing on mechanics – it had the potential to change lives as these children begun to see freedom and adventure in their new set of wheels.

As Robert Pirsig illuminates in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, in this little moment by the side of the road tonight, I stumbled upon the Buddha, the Godhead resting there on my flat tire. Cycling home, I  flew, buoyed up by my firm, new tire and the elation of accessing these dormant memories. Navigating by instinct, I was rewarded at each new turn with new vistas, new joys, new discoveries as I marvelled at street after gorgeous street. Everything felt new, new, new and freedom was found again in this little adventure.