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By Caprice Coleman
Last week we talked about mental awareness and how impact could cause harm without us knowing. This week I want to take the same approach with a different outcome.
I bought a bicycle a while back. Actually, because my family wanted to start riding bikes, I had to buy four bikes at once. I didn’t want to buy them all brand new, so I found a guy on Craigslist not too far away who sold used bikes. I went to his home and purchased four of them.
The bike that I’d gotten for myself looked cool and had shocks. He’d given me a good deal because it needed professional adjustments that would cost him too much to make a profit, but he assured me that the basic mechanics were fine.
While going for rides with my family, the chain would skip if I pedaled too fast, the gears wouldn’t change correctly, and the shocks were seized.
I couldn’t complain because you get what you pay for. The bike looked cool, but it made me hot with frustration trying to work with it. However, over time it didn’t bother me as much and I had gotten used to its ways.
I took the bike out one evening and rode around my community. I remember going up a steep hill and, like normal, the chain began to skip. I pushed through it because I knew on my way back the same hill would be fun riding down.
While on my way back, I rode down the hill and passed over a bridge. The street was busy. I had traffic to my left and woods to my right, and I was forced onto the sidewalk.
In my foresight, I saw a huge pothole in the sidewalk. This pothole was unavoidable; the only thing I could do was brace for the impact that was just a couple seconds away. I had already calculated being thrown off the bike, breaking a wrist or arm, and of course trying to protect my face with a tuck and roll if possible.
The impact was sudden, hard, and fast. BOOM!
I braced, and the next thing I know … it was over. Just like that, the impact that I prepared for did not do what I thought it would. I was so shocked that I began to move my fingers and toes to make sure I wasn’t knocked out and imagining this stuff. Nothing was wrong.
I kept riding the bike and began to notice that as I went over bumps, I could feel the shocks start to give, my chain no longer skipped, and the gears worked! The pothole had hit the bike hard enough to unseize the shocks and tighten the chain. This bike that I had gotten for around $30 was working way past it’s value!
I thought about this and asked myself how this situation applied to me in life. I realize sometimes it takes a life pothole to cause us to dig deep within ourselves and pull out what’s always been there, making us better than we’ve been in a long time.
These situations can cause us to use the potential that’s been seized because of unuse and getting used to getting by. We sometimes forget about the ideas we once entertained but had let go because they seemed out of reach or putting time into them didn’t guarantee a return or profit.
Sometimes circumstances happen that are out of our control, but the result isn’t always negative. Such circumstances have resulted in people becoming self-made millionaires.
The bike lasted me a long time, and I ended up giving it to my son when he outgrew his.
All impact isn’t bad, and sometimes it takes an impact to catapult you to your destiny.
Just something to think about. I call it a dose of Colemanism.
Caprice Coleman is ROH’s color analyst and has been wrestling for more than 20 years. He also is an ordained minister and motivational speaker. A Dose of Colemanism appears every Thursday.
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