Grateful
For training wheels and guiding hands
Even the fall, for what greater fall avoided?
To no longer need
Still! …beware the bark of the Oak
Alleluia comes the day
Not even wheels required
For every child, there comes a time to remove the training wheels and learn to balance oneself. I was fortunate to have a dad help make that transition.
Growing up, we did not get new bikes. They were used-up bikes given to my dad for us kids. With him being a mechanic, he would fix what needed fixing. They always seemed a bit rickety and oversized.
My big day came one late afternoon when dad returned from work. The route was our shell driveway. To the right was a row of young oak trees. With dad balancing the bike, I climbed to seat myself and find my footing on the pedals. Once ready, off we went with dad convincing me how good I was doing – almost by myself. Sustained by a shared momentum, he decides I am ready, and lets go. I’m wobbling forward and on my way.
The next challenge was the turns on each end of the driveway. I had plenty of space to make wide turns. Or so, I thought. I had “almost” completed one of those full turns, and there in front was the oak tree some twenty feet ahead. It was drawing me like a magnet. For whatever reason, maybe anxiety, I was locked on target and couldn’t steer clear. My euphoria came to a sudden crash. I learned how abrasive the bark of a live oak is to human skin. I took a few moments to recover my senses and check my wounds. I got back on and continued to ride until dark.
This event remains a positive memory. I had the will, courage, and trust to take a step in maturity and liberation, a rite of passage: a movement forward
If one thinks of this earthly life as birth-maturation-death or passage to a destination, then we can see a pattern filled with letting go, falling, getting hurt, (hopefully) recovering, and then moving forward by maturation and by new means. At least in my own life, I have seen this pattern unfold many times.
Just like the oak, there are many inevitable, immovable, and tragic events in our lifetime.
After the crash, I could’ve asked to put the training wheels back on but did not. I could not unlearn the facts or the truth that I could now balance on just two wheels. The training wheels were right in themselves and timely. Still, it was probably their limitations preventing the development of skills necessary to balance and steer away from a coarse and immovable object blocking vision and path.
Think about it. How many times do we fall in life? What are its consequences? What are its choices? How does it change us; do we grow from it, or do we regress, or do we just stagnate?
If we are to journey this life with a desire to mature emotionally and spiritually, it is important to differentiate that even the bicycle (much like everything in the physical world) only has purpose insofar as it helps us to our destination. When it has become an obstacle to that purpose, it is best to seek what is higher.
Today, the oak tree still stands. Its girth is much larger, and its bark remains coarse. There remains some beauty about it, although it is being choked by nearby oaks and much starved of ground nutrients and sunlight. Not sure it will be around in another sixty years.
I was fortunate to grow up having a dad. I learned much from him, but I often think my dad could have taught his son a bit more about manhood. Maybe, I would have avoided some of the typical missteps that most young boys make in their maturation. And then again, perhaps he did, but I wasn’t listening.
Perhaps, I needed to encounter that oak tree and its consequences to grow so to detach from unnecessary appurtenances and appearances? Maybe it is in falling where we cross the threshold to gain eternal wisdom.
I leave you with a thirteen minute video from Fr. Richard Rohr speaking on letting go; False ego-Self/ True Soul-Self.
ps. I recognize that some kids never got a bike and never learned to ride. That may have been an unfortunate circumstance of your upbringing but it doesn’t mean you have to carry that loss your entire life. Buy your own then receive from those who have been given.
Could you not discern the Grace and gain its eternal Wisdom?
