Good things sometimes come from unexpected places

I biked into Hagley Park today.  It was beautiful.  Lovely spring weather, flowers blooming everywhere, ducklings swimming in the ponds… what a lovely way to pass the time.

Then, when it was time for the return journey, we discovered something rather significant – one of our tyres had punctured and was steadily hissing air.  A slight problem given we didn’t have any equipment with us to repair it.

We quickly came up with Plan B.  Andy biked home, returning an hour later with the car, and I went for a stroll around the gardens, discovering a new section of garden filled with flowers in full bloom which looked beautiful and smelled devine, and enjoying a pot of tea in the lovely café there.  Although it wasn’t planned at all, it was a lovely way to spend an hour.

On his four-year trip around the world on a 500cc Triumph motorcycle, Ted Simon had a lot of punctures.  At first he would get frustrated by them.  They cost him time and disrupted his plans.  But then he realised that punctures lead great places.  People would appear from nowhere, talk to him and invite him home for dinner.  He’d spend the night somewhere he’d never thought to visit, and he’d inevitably have some kind of adventure.  That meant the punctures themselves became less important, and the journeys the punctures led to far more significant.

Things go wrong.  That’s a fact of life.  But it’s good to know that sometimes those things are exactly what’s needed to open up other possibilities.  Possibilities with flower beds that smell amazing, great pots of tea, fantastic new places, and new and wonderful people.