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What Will You Do When You Achieve Failure?
My first bicycle was pink.
After some upgrades and a paint job, my bike and I became inseparable. I rode that bike everywhere. There were vast fields to the west of my childhood home where I could ride that bike into the foothills of the Oquirrh Mountains.
On a particular afternoon, I came racing home from somewhere. I remember having feelings of elation though the reason for my abundant happiness has been lost to time.
I was riding my bike down the hill by my home, pumping my fists in the air — neither hand on the handlebars. Momentum steered my bike in a straight course right up to the instant I hit some loose gravel in the street.
Faster than I could react, my front tire flipped hard to the right and I found myself flying through the air. Somehow, I got my left arm in front of me before I hit the road. I slid perhaps ten or fifteen feet with my left palm, elbow, and left knee pressed firmly against the road.
Incredibly, my head never hit the ground which was good because bike helmets were not commonplace at that time.
No bones broke and no stitches were required. I did have some gnarly-looking road rash on my elbow for several weeks following the incident and I remember my mom having to pick and dig rocks out from under my skin.
It was the most spectacular crash I ever had on that bike, but it certainly wasn’t the last.
That wreck taught me a valuable lesson: some times were safer than others to ride without hands on the handlebars. I also learned how bad it hurts to have someone dig rocks out of your skin.
Of course, those aren’t lessons I anticipated learning that day in that way. Otherwise, I probably would have kept my hands on the handlebars. Physics is a brutal teacher sometimes and often when least expected.
We don’t often think of achieving failure. However, when failure becomes a mode of learning and progressing, it is an achievement of sorts. It’s the failure that results in giving up that’s the only real failure.
After that crash, I didn’t give up riding. I healed, I learned some important lessons, and I rode again. That failure wasn’t an end for me. It was a checkpoint. I knew there…
