The Hard Road Gets Easier

I got a little good luck and a little bad luck when I decided to do the season’s first mowing.  The good luck was the lawn mower starting right up, an almost unheard of event, at least without extensive tinkering.  The bad luck was a flat tire; a common phenomenon fixed temporarily but repeatedly over the mowing season with an air compressor.

This flat tire wasn’t typical, it required dismounting the tire (hammer, screwdriver, hydraulic jack, pickup bumper, jaws-of-life, nuclear bomb), a tube (15 bucks) and remounting (not done yet…and the weeds are tall).  I’m confident once softball, basketball, senior activities and the other important events that spice my life ebb I’ll get the riding mower in operating condition, which I’m quite certain, it shall remain in (more or less) until late fall.

The reason I’m confident the tedious fix will turn into smooth sailing is a basic constituent of chemical reactions called ‘activation energy’.  The idea is: it takes more energy to start a process (activate it) than to sustain it; like throwing a match into a can of gas. 

Think of a bolder sitting behind a small hump, on top of a hill.  You’ve really got to put a shoulder into getting the rock over that hump, but once it is, away it goes.  That, my friends, is life…unless the boulder rolls up the next hill, reverses, rolls down and then back up the first hill and lands on your foot.  That, too, is life.

Consider teens.  They have energy.  Even when indolently lying around they’re just a bad decision away from action.  But try getting them out of bed; it’s like lighting asbestos with flint.

Riding a bike demonstrates this principle.  Scraped knees, bruised egos and an exhausted dad running alongside lead to thoughtless balance, effortless speed and unbridled freedom.  Even on a micro scale, getting your rump off the couch and onto that ridiculously undersized triangular wedgie applicator takes a tremendous amount of mental power.  But once you’re out on the open road the freedom of childhood comes rushing back…until the seat wedgie pain elevates to excruciating levels, fading to merciful numbness and finally, the panicked realization that numbness in that particular area, other than during childbirth, is a bad thing.

Computer programs bear witness to ‘activation energy’   A program that edits pictures, turns voice into text or allows the creation of banjo tablature is like a shiny new toy under the Christmas tree…that hasn’t been assembled.  The things I could do with the program…if only I knew how to use it.  It’s not until many frustrating hours after I open the program that I can easily zip around, accomplishing what I’d wistfully envisioned…and only later still that I recognize I almost never need to do what that program accomplishes.

I suppose I could consider the acre plus to be mowed, the start-up smoke cloud rolling out of the muffler, the dog chewed seat and the homemade tire-tread blade protector and go buy a new zero-turn mower, but Ole Freebie does the job without a monthly payment.  And while fixing the tire is a bit of a pain, the hard road gets easier.