Before everything fell apart, I had maintained a blog—JustWind—for about seven years, along with a previous coaching practice. The name of the blog and my business was inspired by an interaction with my friend David. I wrote a blog post about it and later incorporated it into the Introduction that I wrote for my unfinished manuscript “It’s Just Wind: What My Bike Has Taught Me About the Power of Perspective.” I have included an excerpt of that Introduction as a bonus post in The Resilient Pen Blog.

I’m mentioning my previous blog and halted book here because the whole thing started as the realization that there are so many ways that cycling is a metaphor for life.

As the throwback blog post explains, I first recognized this when David helped me realize that my complaints after a very windy week on the bike in 2002 were misplaced. He gave me the gift of perspective. As I said in my book introduction, “I began to view life through a different lens. I realized that, not only could I acknowledge how minor an issue a windy bike ride really was in the big picture, but I could choose to see the rest of life’s challenges as “wind” and strive to take them in stride, just as David had taught me to do with the Kansas wind.”

Over the years, I have recognized that the bike provides many metaphors for life, even if the last five years often felt more like a Kansas tornado than a typical windy day.

The metaphor I’ll focus on here is the idea of living one pedal stroke at a time. There are several ways that this idea can be applied, both on and off the bike:

· Presence: It’s important to be fully present on the bike. On a long ride, it’s impossible to predict everything we may encounter, so we need to pay attention. I often find that my senses are highly attuned to my surroundings when I am on my bike. Personally, I don’t wear earbuds. I want to hear every dog toenail or truck coming up behind me. I also want to fully soak up the experience on the bike. Otherwise, what’s the point? In life off the bike, the presence aspect of living one pedal stroke at a time may look like rocking my grandbaby without being on my phone or laptop so that I can fully appreciate and experience every moment. This is so important. While presence keeps us safe on the bike, it helps us to make sure that we are truly living our lives off the bike, rather than just going through the motions of our days.

· Flexibility: Just as an unexpected detour or accident on the road may require a last-minute route change, living life one pedal stroke at a time allows us to continually assess whether or not we are on the right path, spending our time in the best way possible or taking full advantage of opportunities as they present themselves. I am trying to regularly engage in this assessment process as it relates to my business, in conjunction with my priorities at this moment in time. Through this process, I had decided earlier this week to return to publishing a blog post every third week so that I had time to develop some additional offerings and aspects of my business. Much to my surprise, while literally taking one pedal stroke at a time on my bike this afternoon, I realized that I actually want to pause content production altogether for the next several weeks. I had some inspiration about a possible change of approach for my work, and I want to use this live session of Marie Forleo’s B-School to sort it out. I originally purchased the course in 2020 and have gone through it a couple of times, but so much has changed in my life since I worked the course last year and conceived my business plan that it warrants a review. So, I am stepping away from my regular editorial schedule, but I may reach out in the next few weeks, and I will be back with more content once I clarify my current approach. This decision came out of the blue on my bike but is a clear manifestation of living one pedal stroke at a time.

· Isvara Pranidhana: I wrote about this Niyama last week. It is generally interpreted to mean surrendering to a Higher Power. In last week's blog post, I shared my (necessarily partial) lists of things that I can control and that I can’t. This includes an element of acceptance. The bike can teach us a lot about controlling what we can and accepting what we can’t. On any given ride, we can’t control the wind or temperature, but we can choose to ride or not, choose our direction and choose the time of day when we ride. In the bigger picture of life, we will find much less struggle if we accept what we can’t control and take control where we can, in order to make life more pleasant.

· Patience: Living one pedal stroke at a time requires patience and the understanding that we can only see so far down the road. We have to do our best to prepare for what lies ahead, but we can’t predict it or change it. We also have to work to get to our desired destination, whether that is back home, the next overnight town on a weeklong tour or an important life milestone. Regardless of the nature of the destination, we just have to keep putting one pedal stroke in front of the other, again and again. With patience, persistence and some good fortune, we will get there.

· Possibility: Besides requiring flexibility, not knowing what may lie down the road and choosing to live one pedal stroke at a time also opens possibility. Using this approach both on and off the bike allows us to choose our perspective. Admittedly, in the worst years of our family’s struggle, it was hard to see a reason or a blessing in what we were experiencing. However, there came a time when I committed to creating meaning from it. I became determined to turn our pain into purpose, which led to my business and is the idea behind the resilience coaching that I offer. Here, living one pedal stroke a time means allowing the possibility that we could create something good and meaningful from our pain—not that it will fall into our laps, but that we could be empowered to do something with the struggle and that a better road might lie ahead.

As I looked back at my unfinished manuscript of nearly 60,000 words, I realized that there is some pretty good stuff in there. Because I have been living one pedal stroke at a time, and the last five years have changed me in so many ways, I don’t think I will ever publish the exact book I was writing, but maybe there is something to be salvaged from that prior effort. Maybe it’s a different book. I’m open to possibilities, which is one important tenet of living one pedal stroke at a time. We’ll see what the road brings.

I’m excited about my potential new approach and hope that it may allow me to add value more effectively. I’ll be in touch as this idea evolves.