The Unity Bike

 I am vulnerable to black and white thinking, i.e. thinking in extreme terms. I have been thinking and writing about my experiences as a parent and how they relate to my experiences on our tandems, both in terms of the tandem riding as an allegory and as an actual tool in parenting. It's been hard to write these past few days because I have not been living up to my ideal as a parent (or tandem captain) lately. This is not necessarily new, but it's made it harder to write since the persistent thoughts that come back to me are that this blog is foolish and for naught. This is just an error in my thinking, but it is more difficult to write when things are not going according to plan.  I have noticed that I've bothered lately by my son's unwillingness to help out around the house. In my mind he's not contributing to our family's unity since he doesn't seem to be interested in participating in the household. In addition a combination of my schedule, the weather, ...

 Authoritarian parenting hasn't worked for me. Empirically, I can see that it doesn't produce the kind of relationship ideal I want in the family. Moreover, when I think about the assumptions that are behind that model, I see they are cynical and don't really match my view of the world, at least not the view I want to have. I can articulate some postulates to align my parenting with my values, but the question of how to turn those postulates into a working model remains.  I thought about my friend Jim again. We met when I was a graduate student and pretty quickly hit it off. He is the one who had suggested that I write down my ideals for a relationship, which turned out to be helpful. Jim is a sober alcoholic. He got sober in Alcoholics Anonymous . I learned a lot about AA from our conversations, and among the things I found most interesting is the organizational structure of AA. Most people know about the 12 Steps, and some know about the 12 Traditions, or at least many pe...

 I went to a psychologist many years ago. Overall, I think he helped me but he also reinforced some of bad ideas I had acquired, from who knows where. It's also possible, even likely, that I heard what I wanted to hear and glommed onto the things that I found most agreeable. One of the best things he gave me though was a framework for thinking about my emotional states and some concrete things I could do to disrupt ineffective thought loops. It's basically a game of rock paper scissors, though I didn't think of it that way at the time. As he expressed it, I have three systems: cognitive, emotional, physical. Most of the time my cognitive system is the dominant one. I walk around in a calm, rational state. For example, as I write this I am in a neutral state and my cognitive system is at the fore. My decisions are driven by my intellect and I'm mostly dispassionate. But at times my emotional state overwhelms my cognitive state. I no longer act rationally. Though I might ...

 Riding bikes has been an important part of my life since I was about 5 years old. My first experiences on the bike were not really recreational. My first experiences were more about utility. I found that I could ride around the small town where I grew up and visit my family and friends. The bike from pretty early on was a way to get around independently. My relationship with bikes waxed and waned over the intervening years but I took it up again as an everyday mode of transportation about 15-20 years ago. When I had my first career job I bought a nice bike and became a daily commuter. Interestingly, that was also when I purchased my first helmet. Since I rode every day I wasn't particularly interested in riding outside of my commute for recreation or exercise, but I went on a ride with some friends and also started reading journals on crazyguyonabike . I got some ideas about bike touring and decided that maybe I did want to do a little more riding for fun, so I bought a Surly Long...

I have not found a first principles approach to many things to be effective, that is, when I usually start with a particular view of the world and then push that forward, the outcomes are either not the most desirable or don't match reality. Often this is because my a priori assumptions about the world are not firmly grounded and informed by my actual experience. I just have these ideas whose origins are murky. I have had significantly more success when I have adopted a backwards design approach, i.e. where I start by thinking of some specific outcome(s) I would like to achieve and then develop a model informed by the outcome(s). Further, it has been instructive to look at my current situation as outcomes of a model that I may have unintentionally adopted and examine the beliefs and assumptions that underlie that model. With that said, I decided with my parenting to incorporate some first principles into my model building. Briefly, I look at what my parenting looks like right now a...

The genesis of the transformation in my thinking about parenting came from a concrete realization that what I was doing was not working. I had caught glimpses of this for years but these glimpses were not sufficient to bring about any kind of lasting change; I had to have both a big enough crisis to push me out of my authoritarian model and at least some confidence that a different model existed, i.e. a push and a pull. Without these two forces I doubt that I would have seriously reconsidered my paradigm. Once I became open to an alternative, as yet unformed, I found it useful to go back and look at what sort of thinking was underlying my authoritarian parenting. I adopted a backwards-forward analysis, that is, I had to start with poor results to look backward to see what's not working. Then I decided to go back to find the hidden assumptions that, when pushed forward, yielded my results. I was surprised at how ungenerous my assumptions were. The first thing that became apparent is...

The kids and I have been on several rides lately. Because of their different sizes (and my affinity for bikes) we have multiple tandems. The original tandem is a 2009 Cannondale Road tandem. This is the one my son has named the Unity Bike. My wife and I bought this used in the beginning of 2012. She and I rode it regularly when we lived in Georgia, but we have not done much riding since we moved to Baltimore in 2017; childcare became much more difficult. When we were in Georgia I bought another Cannondale, this one a mid-90s Los Dos, but that bike was stolen about a year after we moved to Maryland. We replaced that bike with two Co-Motion Periscope tandems, probably from the mid-aughts. One was a Periscope Scout and the other a Periscope Hammerhead. I ended up selling the Hammerhead a year or so later, but we still have the Scout. That's the bike my son and I use for getting around town. It has platform pedals, flat bars, and fenders, so it's pretty good as a run-about, though ...