Biking

A preface: This post is a timestamp of who I was as a junior in high school — headstrong and a little stormy. I wrote this as a possible college essay and it very much still reads as one. If you’re reading this, thanks for giving her and this a chance.

I believe in telling the truth as much as the next person, but I think we kid ourselves on how far our propensity for honesty goes. And I don’t mean the casual white lies — the feigned enthusiasm accompanying our parents’ “Oh honey, Bob just went for a swim with his other fish friends in the ocean” or the calm front you put on when left to distract the birthday girl just moments before her big surprise. On the opposite side of the spectrum, I’m not disheartened by a harrowing world full of pathological liars. When I talk about withholding the truth, I mean the lapses of memory, the innate forgetfulness we are left with when we look back upon our lives. That’s not to say we never remember the outlines of memories; we just color in the chasms of white with romanticized markers and extrapolated details. Everyone paints in their own shades, occasionally switching out bottles, all culled from certain predilections and idiosyncrasies our hearts have picked up pace to. These are the things that sway us from the thin line of truth — our natural biases, the morals and codes that have shaped our outlook on the world.

05 Eggshell white — innocence waiting to be cracked

Growing up, next to a lack of cultural awareness lied the paved sidewalks and quintessential picket-fenced houses that lined my block. It’s like the bubble of upper middle class America was made for uniform commercialism. What better way to commemorate this ideal by buying your five year old a bike, right?

09 Army green — a ball of anxiety, jealous and angry and wanting to be tough

I “learned” how to bike for the same reason my parents didn’t jump in when I fell into the hotel pool and naturally drifted towards the floaties, for the same reason some boys will grow up avoiding hoodies, for the same reason some girls wear rape whistles around their neck — a rudimentary set of survival skills.  And although you can say my dad technically went over the rules with me, I think that’s giving him a bit too much credit.

16 Sky blue — trust in the openness of the process

For that matter, I do not know how to ride a bike. They say you can never forget, but they fail to mention that your muscles do the improvising for you. I can barely say that I’m even an acquaintance of biking, awkwardly fumbling whilst shaking its handlebars. If you were to ask me for directions to guide you through the process, I wouldn’t have the words because I don’t know the memory. My best advice is to stop overthinking it. Your feet will always find their rhythm. No matter how many times you fall, always know that the ground will catch you. I have done my fair share of failure — editing the same video five times just to crash Final Cut Pro before exporting, running thirty scans of met-HbA through the spectrometer just to find out it’s been contaminated, preparing to present a radical solution to Italy’s slow growth just to find out that the government had already been planning to implement it. Both despite and because of this, I have learned that In order to bounce back, you have to build up the confidence to know that getting up is worth it, to know that you have the tools to succeed one day.

You can’t keep checking yourself to see that you won’t fall. Instead, look up and see what’s next. No, less passive — strive to hit that sudden curve in the road, chase the distant jingle of the ice cream truck, check up on that friend who you’ve been worrying about. One day, I stopped checking to ensure that my feet were going in the same circles; I just knew they would. Because of that security, I was able to move on to bigger and better things. Like many of my firsts, I don’t remember the exact details of how my feet managed to trust themselves on their own. We put ourselves on a timeline of these firsts, these grand moments, when our life is largely consistent of minutiae. What is instilled in me from this unteachable lesson of biking is more than tripping over pedals. It is realizing how little we know of the world, realizing that no one really knows the formula for more than just subsisting on this place we call earth. I can’t tell you what came next after my dad let go and I pedalled away. I just know that one day, I did.