Many years ago, I spent a Saturday afternoon with my young
daughter and pre-teen son in the park across from our apartment in Evanston,
Illinois. My son and I played manly
games of nonsense and my daughter made a great effort to learn to ride her new
bicycle. (Why the bike didn’t have
training wheels is a mystery lost in time.)
She was extremely focused and very determined to learn. She’d take a couple of turns of the pedal and
then put her foot down to stop the tilt to the side. Over the course of the afternoon she made
little progress. It was always: two
pedal strokes and a foot put down to stop the bike.
I tried to help by holding the seat and walking/running next
to her, but she would have none of it.
She wanted desperately to learn by herself. So I became a cheerleader, telling her that
if she kept trying that hard, she would surely be able to ride her bike by the
next day. She worked at it, without
success, until dusk.