Marc Kitteringham
This is not about how to fix a bike. There have been countless books and posts on the subject, and for me to try and teach you how to fix a bike would be futile. I'm by no means good at it, and there are better teachers out there. This is more about how fixing a bike can fix other things at the same time. Our world is kind of going to shit, and we need to find some ways to fix it. I think working on bikes definitely helps.
Bikes have been called the "last democratic machine" and I think that is true. Cities generally get better when more people ride them. People generally get happier and life gets a little bit better. For me, they are primarily a means of escape. If I can get away from the badness in the world for a bit, climb a big damn hill and make some long skids all the way down I tend to forget about the hard parts of life. Passing a fork in a road and wondering where the other path leads, abruptly turning around and following it is one of the biggest joys in my life.
However, with bikes along with everything else, things tend to fall apart. When they do, its up to us to fix them. Things have fallen apart in a big way. The world has had it rough for a while, and things aren't necessarily going to get much better.
I love sitting down to a puzzle: taking apart a derailleur, cleaning all of the moving parts, restoring the shine, re-installing the fly-wheels and putting it back on the bike. I like the smell of the cleaner, the feel of the grease on my hands and the quiet of working in my own space – in my own head. I am absorbed into the project. It is just me and my bike... a problem that I know I can solve.
Then there are issues that I cannot figure out. How my long cage rear mech won't go around my gears properly. I reach out to somebody I trust. I get advice and I turn it into something that I can manage to work on. People are brought together by the problem of working on bikes. We take something that cannot be fixed by one person and by banding together we can figure out how to make it work. We can change it, alter it, transform it into something that we can solve.
These days, we need to remember this for the big problems too. Bikes have been called the "last democratic machine" and I think it is true. It is true for more than just bringing people together on a civic level and making our cities a better place. It is also true as a metaphor for the state of the world we are in. Things have gotten very complicated very fast, and to tackle them alone is a daunting impossibility.
But that's why we have other people.
We can fix it.