It's Good to Suck at Something

I went on a bike ride with my husband on Saturday, which highlighted once again my difficulty being in my own experience when I am around other people, but that is for another post.  What I’m interested in today is the fact that it also highlighted the fact that I still can’t really ride out of the saddle.  I can pedal a few times, but not for any sustained, coordinated amount of time.  The background here is that I just learned how to ride a bike about two years ago.  Literally, riding in a parking lot with my husband running alongside.

I watch my husband climb a hill up out of his seat and I can see that it is effective, but part of me feels like I’ve spent two years getting pretty good at riding up a hill sitting down, so I should just stick with that.  After all, when I do get up, it seems really hard, not just in terms of coordination but it uses different muscles, which I suppose is the whole point, but makes me tired.  As I’m writing this, I am remembering that the story about me learning to walk is that the doctor said basically I had gotten so good and fast at crawling that there was no incentive for me to walk—he recommended my mom get some kind of a stand up push toy to motivate me.

In yoga, the word we use for the effort and discipline it takes to do something hard is tapas.  Tapas literally means heat and pretty much when we do something difficult, it creates heat, like friction.  Recently, one of my yoga students said that she used something she got from me with her third graders, which is that when you are new at something, you suck at it (that’s how she said it, I don’t remember if I said it that way, but it is definitely possible).

Just in the last couple of weeks, I decided to learn to knit “continental style,” which is different and more efficient that the way I had been knitting.  It was really frustrating and annoying for a little while and I thought about just doing it the old way, but convinced myself that if I stuck with it, I would be glad and it would pay off and it did (and it didn’t take long at all).

So I thought about that on my bike ride and know that with a little bit of tapas, I can learn how to get out of the saddle.  I just have to be willing to suck at it and feel like it’s “too hard” for a little while.  I am old enough to know that staying with something familiar just because it’s familiar is a terrible reason, but it is amazingly hard to break the habit.  When I think back to how hard it was to ride my bike two years ago, though, and how much fun I’ve had since then (and how much I’ve learned about myself) I know it’s worth it.