Can you remember that first time you were actually pedaling, steering, and balancing a bicycle all by yourself?
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” Albert Einstein has had so many wonderful and uplifting quotes attributed to him. Not only was the man a genius, but he was also very wise.
Life is like riding a bicycle. If you are riding a bicycle and you stop moving, there’s a good chance that your balance will go all cattywampus and you will fall down. Boom and Ouch.
When it comes to bicycling and balancing, your options are somewhat limited: keep moving, stop moving and fall on the ground, or get off the bicycle completely and start walking. And when it comes to life, we intuit and believe and know that out life options are not somewhat limited. In fact, some of us believe that our options are infinite. But are they? I’m just wondering aloud here . . . what do you think? I think that Einstein’s brilliance might be the answer here: Our options stay alive when we stay in balance our Higher Self with the pavement beneath us.
I like the spirit of Einstein’s quote and how he has reduced this simile to its simplest terms: ride or fall. Keep going or get stuck. And I do believe that some life changes have necessitated the need to trade in an old ride for a new one.
There are times in my life that I look back on and now can see that parking the bicycle was the best thing I could have done. After living in a state of stagnancy, falling to the ground numerous times, and feeling the Ouch Factor, I finally came to my senses and parked the bicycle and walked away. Heck, I didn’t even bother locking it up to a bike stand or a nearby tree because I knew that I was never going to give that bicycle another go. Let someone else have it! Some events in life are Good Riddance worthy. At times like this, it is always good to select a new (and healthy!) set of wheels and ride like the wind off into a new paradigm.
Life, like a bicycle, is the vehicle we are riding. Our infinite options in life are actually the directions in which we point our front tire. The secret is to keep riding toward what we know are true directions to our Higher Self. I have felt my spirit’s unsettling, intuitive nudge when I know that I have been pedaling in the wrong direction, and I have certainly experienced that feeling of What the heck have I done? right before crashing and falling. Again. My takeaway? Patch up any scrapes and get back on the bicycle and find a balance point and keep moving forward.
Can you remember that first time you were actually pedaling a bicycle all by yourself? It felt so liberating and exhilarating. There was that split second when you felt your big brother’s hand leave the back of your bike seat and you felt your sense of balance kick into gear. I so vividly remember this. I went shooting down the driveway (and thank God that no car was coming up the street!), banked to the left and rode down the street to the cornfield that bordered the cemetery. (Yes, I grew up in a very weird Midwest town!)
It was that split-second feeling that has stuck with me. The second when I knew that I was balancing all on my own. No sibling to steer for me or to keep us upright on two wheels when I was bumming a tandem ride on a back fender. Just me, my hand-me-down sky-blue Schwinn, and the open road. I rode all afternoon in the relative safety of the cemetery — the roads there being so peaceful. I found My Balance while I practiced right turns and left turns. Stopping and getting started again. I arrived home feeling triumphant. Liberated, actually. I had discovered my independence. My Movement.
Yup. Einstein had it right. Movement and Balance are key. And let’s not forget Risk with a capital R. It takes a lot of guts some days to take a deep breath and sail down the driveway, not knowing if you are going to keep riding or if you are going to crash to the pavement. I believe that we all crave that feeling of Triumphant Balance in our days. That feeling deep inside that tells us we are doing life justice with the right amount of movement and balance.
Today? I am going to get back up on my Bicycle and ride like the wind. There is no cemetery down the road from where I now live, but I am going to head there in my mind. Back to that ultra-satisfying feeling of Balance and Movement.
I couldn’t help but think back to my old friend Donnalyn who stopped by my house one day to see me when I wasn’t home. She left an envelope on my front porch, and in the envelope was $50 cash with a note saying, “I’ve been where you are. After my divorce, I didn’t think I was going to be able to figure it all out. You are going to make it.”
This truly struck a chord of sublime resonance with me. I felt completely busted — in a good way. It made me realize that rather than ignore or abolish these stuck spots in my life, maybe it was time to use them, like throwing down kitty litter behind a spinning tire in the snow, to gain some new traction: in other words, re-write my Repetitive (and oftentimes boring) Statements into Rev-Up Statements.
Next, I re-wrote my rants with a positive spin that was designed to get me up and going again. No more Stuck Spots! Putting the positive spin on things required ACTION on my part. I had to visualize and implement alternatives to just spinning into a deeper and messier rut. The great news is that I felt empowered by my own personal recognition of This isn’t good anymore. I want different. I caught myself and verbally stopped myself from launching into Rant Mode. It felt great! And I am guessing that my friends and family think that it is pretty nice, too! There is nothing like a broken record to put someone to sleep. It generates white noise that blocks a lively conversation exchange from taking place. Friends and family, I am trying to exercise new awareness!
The great part? This process works! I have been catching myself as I spin myself deeper into some repetitive statement . . . and I have been stopping myself right there.
Numbers.
There is simply so much cool stuff going on there. Quantity vs. quality. Count vs. noncount. We think of a life — a count noun — and we count the number of lives on the planet. But when we think of our our own life? We think “in terms of wholes that can’t be cut up into pieces.” It’s one whole life. It’s my life! And like grass, rice, and money . . . we don’t actually cut our own life up into pieces . . . even when we think in terms of annual events such as birthdays and anniversaries. It’s all one big whole that we truly prefer not to relegate to the Noun Category of Count. We want to make it count in the ways that are important . . . not in some grammatical or statistical way.
My advice to self: Just live and give it your best in the moment. You’ve got this. While I appreciate the concepts of mindfulness and how important it is to be aware and to be positive, there is more. There is life as a noncount noun. It’s okay to count the little things as long as I remember the bigger picture. And sometimes it is so hard to keep sight of this enormous, huge, ginormous Universe of which I am but a tiny speck.
You’re at a party and you really don’t know anyone there. You came because someone from your professional networking group invited you. He tells you that it will be a great way to meet new people. You are doing your best to “mingle” and make polite conversation. On the inside you feel awkward and out of place and are wondering when you can make a move for the nearest exit.
Lest this become a lesson in the grammatical usage of gerunds and participles, I believe that there is more to this way of thinking: passion = noun –> verb. As in so many components of life and relationships, there is a heck of a lot of semantics attached to the way we speak, think, and act.
Click on the 
The Unseen Words Project 