Aside from my love of motorcycles, I am also a pretty avid mountain biker. And if you have read much from me in the past you know that I tinker with everything. So, over the winter I converted one of my mountain bikes to single speed from the twelve it had at the time.

Now, you might ask why I would want to take a bike with twelve perfectly functioning gears down to one? Well, there is a simplicity to a single speed. Furthermore, for those who have not ridden a single speed in some time, it brings back the joy and childhood fun factor of being on a bike.

But, you have to embrace one basic concept. 90+ percent of the time you are not in the right gear. Because…well…you only have one.

Now, when you do this you end up getting other chain rings and rear cogs with different teeth (sizes) based on the different terrain you might encounter. This means you have to prepare for your ride. Luckily, a lot of where I ride locally is pretty flat, so the gear set I chose works really well a majority of the time. However, if I plan to go anywhere else I have to set up my gear to be appropriate for the terrain I plan to ride. Again, I am selecting the right gear for as much of my ride as possible, but I know that I will most likely not be in the right gear for most of the ride.

But why do I tell you this? Well, it got me to thinking about life. In fact this whole concept came to me while on vacation with my family in Ireland. While there we rented cars and drove over 900 miles seeing the Emerald Isle. Over there, most vehicles are manual and automatic rentals cost more. I am proficient with any manual transmission, but I had never shifted with my left hand. So it took a bit of getting used to, as well as the fact that I was changing gears a lot on their narrow, winding roads. In essence I was continually searching for the right gear.

You see, just like with my bicycle or in that small car in Ireland, in life, there is no right gear all the time. If we are not constantly changing gears we find that we are not managing the drive very well. When you do come to a bit of straight and easy road in life you might stay in high gear for a period. But, inevitably, life throws different terrain at us and we need to shift gears to handle these changes.

Furthermore, in truth, automatic can be the death of an active life. It can create complacency and stagnation. Opting for an automatic approach to life we find ourselves being lived by life and us not living life. We are just along for the ride. But this is a choice we make.

I have found we mostly need to accept and embrace the simple fact that change is inevitable. We just have to find the right gear to allow us to negotiate were we are for this moment.

But how, you may ask, do we do this? And this is what we are looking for, right? Some practical advice.

Before that let’s set some ground rules. First, I do believe there is one truth. For me that source of truth comes from my faith. So I come from the standpoint of there being absolutes in life. No fuzzy logic here, good and bad, true and false do exist. So no right gear does not imply there is no right.

That out of the way, how do we find the “right” gear.
Well, there are a lot of factors in that decision I would not hazard to try to work out for you based upon who you are, where you are, where you came from or where you are going. Yes, sadly, you have to choose your own gear.

However, there are some absolutes in finding the right gear.

First and foremost, you have to choose the gear for where you are in life from the standpoint of the grade you are negotiating right now. You see, going downhill in life requires decision around whether you are capable of running in the top gear at top speed and still making the corner at the bottom of the hill. Similarly, going down hill in a low gear means that you are going to be running the engine really hard, but it may be keeping your motion in check. You may be using the gear you are in to check your speed and regulate your speed. This is called engine braking, as we do this in life as well. We do so when we regulate the speed of life by making decisions slowly and methodically.

Going up hill in life, gears have a very different effect. They can make the assent easier or cause you to work ever harder to pump the pedals to make it up the hill. It totally depends upon whether you are trying to make the assent easier or get the optimum workout from the effort. Meaning we may have to make quick decisions that impact what is happening at this very moment so we do not start rolling back down life’s hill unchecked.

But the question you may be asking is how to find that right gear in life?

My experience in this has been that we must seek the gear that challenges us, but does not burn us out too quickly. It also means that if we are burning out, we need to shift down. If we are slowing down we need to shift up. No hill, up or down, works in one gear. We must be ready and capable of change and self-aware enough to know when we need such change.

It is gaining this level of self-awareness is where I see the most problem. This tends to also be when we get too comfortable in the gear we are in and habits become….habitual. This goes back to us letting life run us, rather than us running our lives.

Seeking a level of self-awareness by questioning our state and our motives is somewhere most people do not want to put the effort into doing. They get happy’esque where they are. They lull themselves into a state of happy enough. Not really growing, not really changing, just existing. And this is where the joy get sapped out of life

And as a quote I use here from Jack London states, “The proper function of a man is to live, not exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”

So stay tuned as we look into the world of living in No Right Gear. I plan to delve more into how to find the right gear for right now as well as looking at stuff I like in this life like mountain bikes, motorcycles and gear.