I bought a dirt bike this year after saving up for a while. My son has been riding since he was pretty young and has been anxiously waiting for the day we could both ride together. We eventually landed on a 2001 Suzuki RM125. A 2-stroke, specifically because we wanted a simpler engine we could learn to work on together. Neither of us had a lot of experience working on engines, and that was kind of the point.

When we picked up the bike, the seller demonstrated that it ran fine. When we got home, we couldn't get it started. If you know me at all, I don't like getting ripped off. My brain and heart went right to that explanation. But I didn't get any bad vibes from the person who sold it to me, and I knew where they lived, so I doubt they were trying to pull a fast one. Something was clearly wrong, just nothing obvious.

So my son and I started methodically testing and replacing things. Swapped spark plugs. Swapped out old for new gas/oil mixture. Bought a new carburetor. Ensured the piston and rings were good. Made sure we had compression. Tried bump starting. Tried gas directly in the spark plug hole. Nothing. Not even a hint of the engine wanting to turn over. So. Many. Diagnostics.

For those familiar with 2-strokes and engines in general, you need two things: the right fuel/air mixture and a spark. We couldn't figure out which was the problem because we got zero feedback no matter what we changed. Every variable, no response. It was starting to look like we'd need to take the bike to a professional, and I was adamantly against that. Riding dirt bikes, really riding dirt bikes, requires the owner to be able to maintain their bike and engine. This wasn't just about getting the bike running. It was important to both of us to be able to do this ourselves. For two people without a lot of engine experience, figuring this out would be a real win. Proof that we could take on something we didn't fully understand and come out the other side.

Then one day my son decided to pull off the reeds. The reeds are valves that open when the piston rises, creating vacuum, and close on descent, creating pressure. They prevent backwash into the intake and ensure efficient transfer to the combustion chamber. What he found was something neither of us knew was possible: the engine was flooded behind the reeds. Bingo. Since this was a part of the engine where trapped fuel would never evaporate on its own, it suddenly made sense that nothing we tried had worked. Every fix we attempted was downstream of the actual problem.

My son dried everything out, put it all back together, and we got pure, beautiful turnover of the engine. I can't fully describe that moment. The relief, the joy, the feeling of we actually did this. Two people who had no business fixing an engine, figuring it out anyway.

You might be picking up on the metaphor here, but let me spell it out.

A lot of us find ourselves in a season where we used to run well. Then one day, nothing works. We don't know why. We try everything. The obvious stuff, the stuff people tell us to try, the stuff that logically should work. But there's no spark. No feedback. No sign that anything is changing.

I've been in that place more than once. New chapters where everything is unfamiliar and each step feels like a potential failure. Where you don't have a map and every direction feels like the wrong one. The temptation in those moments is to either keep doing the same things harder or just stop moving altogether.

But here's what I want you to sit with. The problem might not be where you're looking. You might be swapping spark plugs and rebuilding carburetors when the real issue is flooded behind a valve you didn't even know existed. It could be something you've never examined. An old wound. A relationship or a job that's been quietly suffocating you. A belief about yourself that you just accepted as true and never questioned.

And here's the part that really got me: that fuel behind the reeds was never going to evaporate on its own. Time alone wasn't going to fix it. Somebody had to go in, open it up, and dry it out. Some of the things keeping us stuck are like that. They don't resolve with patience. They resolve when you're willing to look somewhere you never thought to look.

My son and I didn't fix that bike by trying harder. We fixed it by getting curious about a part of the engine we'd both overlooked. That's the move. Not just persistence, but the courage to pull apart something you assumed was fine.