Who doesn't like bikes?! As a kid bikes provided me with transportation, camaraderie, health, and income. I love riding so much, I became a bike courier until I flew over a car I rear-ended while flying down a hill and lost my front teeth. Then I got cold feet.
25 years later, working through a divorce, I was able to embrace my passion for riding again. I was inspired by a divorce recovery class that fostered self-care to some needy individuals, which I went through again two years later to see if I was making any progress :-/
I dug into my spiritual life and tried to find the places that could help me to get through the personal grief and my sons' needs. One tool I came across, called the Five F's, has been helpful in maintaining balance and recognizing what I need to work on when its not. I am not sure who came up with it, I've seen it include two other elements and be in the shape of a ship's wheel for those who are nautically inspired, but I am a cyclist. So I see a bike wheel.
I also like physics and if you understand each spoke to be like a vector in being "a quantity having direction and magnitude, especially as determining the position of one point in space relative to another" (Google, 2015), then you might appreciate that when one or two of the spokes are out of whack, you can have a pretty a bumpy ride.
Let's push this a little further and see what it means for relationships, when you have two wheels trying to work together (like a bike!), and how they can impact each other when the vectors have gone awry.
(Arthur's Cycling Clipart, 2015)
So I pack this tool with me wherever I go. Some environments are less conducive to a "true" wheel than others, and as I look forward, and want to be as intentional as I can be about maintaining balance through the changes that lie ahead.
Practically, this means keeping up with responsibilities to my sons, to their education, to my health, with my habits and goals and wanting that to include elements of faith and friends by association.
With that kind of asceticism in mind, am I still able to indulge in the freedom I seek to live out in less than a year? I believe I am!
