My Daughter Rides a Bike Now

Tonight we went to the blacktop at the elementary school so my 6-year-old daughter could practice riding her new bike. I hadn’t seen her ride a bike yet– she learned how to at bike camp a few weeks ago, but we hadn’t gotten a bike to fit her frame.

She zoomed steadily on her new pinkish purple strider. Pedal pedal pedaled with confidence. I had brought my speaker, so I asked if she wanted to jam to one of her tunes. “Are there any songs about bikes?” she asked.

“Yeah, there’s this one by Queen,” I said, as I pulled up the song “Bicycle Race.”

I put the song on and we pedaled around the blacktop together, her on her bike, me on mine. Freddie Mercury sang for us and I watched my girl feel the sense of freedom and joy offered by bike riding. I felt proud that she had picked it up quickly, but more than that, I felt happy that she could now feel the power she could generate on her own. The power to move herself through the world with deftness, and now, a little more speed.

My Wikipedia Page

I think about what I would like my Wikipedia page to say once I’m more well-known. Thinking about my Wikipedia page is a good exercise for thinking about what goals I would like to set for myself in life.

My page would say something like:

Michelle Terese Folk Johnson (born November 1, 1979) is an American Bandleader and Feminist Revolutionary.

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That’s it, that’s all I’ve got for now. I have plenty ideas of what might follow, but also it’s late and I need to go to bed and this counts as today’s blog post for the current daily challenge I set for myself. Good night!

Shortcuts

This evening I was talking with my martial arts training partner on the subject of teaching internal arts to external stylists.

“I believe there are shortcuts,” I said to him.

“I don’t believe in shortcuts,” he ultimately said. “You have to put in the work.”

I thought for a while.

“But I still think shortcuts exist,” I said. “Like if you’re attempting to get great at one thing in your life, maybe you can use seemingly completely unrelated info from another part of your life where you’re already great, and apply those abilities to the understanding of your newer skill.”

He thought about that. He agreed that what I was talking about could be a thing.

That satisfied me.

I think the thing I’m thinking of is called a wormhole, or time travel, or getting older, or rewiring our neural network. Anyway, I believe that shortcuts to getting great at stuff exist.

They just aren’t actually shortcuts. They’re more like tunnels through and among different (seemingly unrelated) abilities.

I think the tunnels are where the fun lives.