Excellent
I much appreciated the honesty displayed at the end, I still feel inadequate but just a touch less because of that.
The only one that I could only remotely identify with was riding along on the balance beam. I used to run an annual race that went across a long covered bridge. Most covered bridges are planked perpendicular to the line of travel---this one was parallel.
To make it more interesting the gaps between the planks were, in many cases, wider than the tires on a road bike. Fall in the groove and you can fill in the rest of that stunt. Many riders actually dismounted and walked their bikes across. Being a 100+ mile race it didn't play to much of a roll in the end result. I was lucky--I always rode across and avoided the gap problem.
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” ---Sir Winston Churchill
"Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all." ---John W. Gardner
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ---C. S. Lewis