Bicycles – Heal Into Your Desires

Yesterday I sorted axel nuts. A task I initially felt was a waste of time and was I really getting paid to sort? But it reminded me of the beginnings of being a mechanic. Coop days where a volunteers task was to sort. There’s a TON to learn from sorting parts. There are lots of unique differences between axle nuts in fact. There’s also some humility needed since I associate it with the start of my learning and I was divided between nostalgia and ego.

But back to the nuts. There’s obviously size differences and then thread pitch is the next step to consider. But my axle nut chart, {picture to come as reference}, only has so much range with its 6 options (3 difference circumferences and 3 difference pitches). Some nuts were too big and some too small so I could use the discernment of my eye to weed them out in the beginning (e-bikes for the larger nuts and vintage bikes for the smaller). Recently I encountered an axle nut that didn’t fit a 13 or 12 mm wrench in the collection of standard bike tools. “An imperial size,” my spouse chipped in. The nut was so thin and fragile and stuck that an adjustable was mangling it 😥 .

If you’ve enjoyed the article this far, “Congratulations!”, you’re a huge nerd like me. Maybe you like to get dirty, take things apart or some other obscure thing I can’t think of. Feel free to email me about it and I will add you to my email list once I get that going. Where I want to go with all of this is into the human mind. What do axle bolts have to do with the mind?

This kind of focus on the details of small hardware allows me to relax. Paying attention to the feel of the nut screwing onto the chart, using my sight to assess whether it needs to go into another bin for cone parts, and smelling the old grease and grit that coats them all is an immersive experience. The feeling of not being enough being humbled through a simple task of sorting, unlocking a sort of flow or meditative state.

It is through the work of my hands that I can continue to do the work of the mind and I’m often wondering how they are more and more combined in my life. How do bikes fit with therapy? What can I use from my therapy training to assist me as a mechanic? Have they already combined into the opportunities I’ve had, the experiences I’ve made, the communities I’ve mingled with? I desire that you see yourself as whole, through the lens of many combined identities.

Bicycles have been a part of my life for a long time. Somewhere, my parent’s have a photo of me at 8 or 9 balancing a pool noodle on my helmet while riding. I also fondly recall riding my cat (Sneezy) around my cul-de-sac in my backpack, much to her protesting. But bicycles didn’t become as integral to my life until I started learning how to work on them mechanically. This process began during my undergrad degree where there was a bike cooperative (Right to Move) attached to the downtown campus of my school in Montreal. I still remember going inside the coop for the first time and feeling very out of place, but also curious and intrigued.

It wasn’t until a couple of years later when my path to becoming a professional mechanic was clear. Another city (Toronto) and coop (Bike Pirates) later, a friend of mine named Matt handed me a bike frame with only the cranks and brakes attached and told me to build. I looked at him deploringly and said I didn’t know how. A few days and several hours of laboring later, Esmerelda was born. I sold her off a several years later in Victoria, BC so she may still be rolling around!

I will never forget Esmerelda. After the build, I started bike couriering in Toronto which will also remain an unforgettable endeavour. I remember stopping at my friend Heather’s (former courier) place on my way home from work and lying on her kitchen floor shovelling in some bulk peanuts she just purchased before she politely took the bag away from me. I hadn’t yet learned with how much food fuel was needed to do the kind of riding I was doing.

Having been mugged at gunpoint in Montreal when I was 17, it took me over a decade to recover the sense of safety that I grew up feeling. Having a bicycle to rely on, that I could repair on the spot, was an enormous leap of recovery from this experience.

It wasn’t without many trials and tribulations. My first professional shop mentor was a gentleman that was of similar age to my parents and the intimacy of us working together one on one seemed to get some wrong ideas in his head about our connection. I almost quit, but decided to take the opportunity to put him in his place with my words and see what happened. Despite my remaining disappointment and empathy for my younger self, it was an empowering experience. I ended up remaining and learning what I could before I moved on with the relationship in good standing. But this was only one of many deeply sexist and power abusing experiences that I have endured in the world of bicycles in order to get where I am today.

I never set out to be a mechanic, I never thought I would be a mechanic and I certainly never thought that almost 2 decades after Esmerelda I would still be holding a wrench in my hand. These days I’m wrenching (term for doing bike mechanics) so much that if I don’t stretch before bed my body will wake me up in the night to make me. This may also be an element of aging 😛

I am passionate about teaching others how to do this work. This skill set has given me so much joy, community, connection and empowerment throughout my life. It has helped to build my self-esteem, shaped the way I travel and interact with the communities I’ve lived in, and allowed me a sense of safety and security when exploring new places.

I also see learning these, as well as other types of skills, as therapeutic. Sometimes it is helpful to take abstract work in our minds out into the physical world to labor over with our hands and our eyes until we can make sense of it all. It has long been a desire of mine to combine my work as a therapist with my work as a bicycle mechanic. It is also my desire that you feel capable to learn something that you otherwise thought might not have been possible. If you have a similar experience where a skillset chose you instead of the other way around, feel free to share in the comments below.

Photo by Marija Zaric on Unsplash