a bicycle wheel

9 december

There is a little description in Pirsig’s “Zen and the art of motorbike repairment” that frequently preys on my natural clumsiness. The protagonist of the book is describing, from all possible things, instruction manuals for assembling japanese bicycles. The first sentence in all those manuals is “in order to assemble this bicycle, great peace of mind is required”.

Today I expend 12 hours (minutes more, minutes less) installing a new rim in the back wheel of my race bike.

Threading a bicycle wheel yourself is interesting work, because it combines the repetition of a mechanical task (putting each spoke in the axe of the wheel and screwing it to the rim) with some needed knowledge into structural mechanics (the pattern in which the spokes cross each other is crucial for the strength of the wheel) and a feeling for equilibrium (to get the wheel to be straight, each spoke has to be screwed at the right tension, each a bit different from each other). So indeed, peace of mind is required. And it normally takes me from half an hour to perhaps one hour.

Now, the funny thing is that today I wasn’t more clumsy than normal, or more stressed. Actually, for most of the time (except the moments of realizing that the pattern I was trying was the wrong one, or when I saw -again- that I started at the wrong point and had to start it all over again) I was amusing myself. Could it be that manual work gives us peace of mind, as much as it needs it?

Pretty much everybody nowadays is well aware of a renaissance of sorts for the idea of “the handy man”. At some absurd levels, without doubt, but also at some interesting ones. Friends talking about axes the whole time and doing their own wood chopping, others designing and building sailing boats, and yet others moving to the countryside to be able to have a garden, and tend it. Let alone the ones of us that started practicing a martial art well into our forties, intending to go on for as long as possible. So it does begs the question: when did we forget? How comes that once upon a time we thought that we would be free if we would get stuff, instead of making it ourselves? Once upon a time it was indeed a luxury to be able to buy the best threaded wheel for your bike, from the hand of a professional. Yet to have those 12 hours is a luxury too.

Tomorrow I’ll pass by the shop I buy my bicycle parts, and they will be laughing their heads off when I tell about the 12 hours. I’ll be laughing with them. They can thread a wheel for some other client, I’ll keep the laughing together.

Seems like a good deal to me.