the sticking point

There was a sticking point. It was nearly perfect, that wheel, nearly but not quite. It would spin freely – as free as birdsong on a spring morn – for almost the entirety of its celestial path; almost but not quite the entirety. For there was one little point at which it would stick; a jarring, ugly interruption to the flow of life; an unwanted death and rebirth with every revolution.

I had been using the bicycle for several days, getting along with it despite its little defect: an irregularity in the rim of the front wheel, doubtlessly a scar from some past trauma; an unexpected rock, perhaps, crashed into in a moment of exuberant abandon; a scar that had never healed. Ever since that ancient incident, the bicycle had had a judder. One could live with it, of course, but somehow that little judder – like tectonic plates rubbing up against one another – detracted from the bliss of the breeze against the cheek.

So that morning I took out the versatile tool which I had been carrying all along; I unfolded it into a pair of pliers; I loosened the front brakes just a tad, the tiniest of adjustments; I folded up the tool and put it away. And as I stood up, before I had even sat on the bicycle, the full beauty of the pot plant hanging from the old tree trunk flowed within me.

It is not always necessary to remove the blemishes of time; the scars that speak of those times when we dared to live life openly, with abandon, vulnerable to what might be. If those scars cause a judder we can work at smoothing them out, attempting to return to the innocent perfection of youth. But another way is to slacken off the brakes a little more and live life with even more abandon; for if nothing can rub against the blemishes then they are no longer a problem; they are transformed with the slightest of tweaks from difficult issues to part of the beauty of life, from ugly scars to the divine wrinkles in the face of an old man who has found contentment.

(March 2005)