Life is like learning to ride a bicycle. . .
there is a movie that came out a little while ago, starring Tom hanks and Tom’s character plays on the Autistic spectrum. The reason I bring up Forrest Gump, is because there is a popular movie quote that comes from that movie that people use quite often, and that is “life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are gonna to get.” And for years I used that in my life to justify the things that were happening good or bad. I cannot be the only person who looks at it this way, but here’s the thing that is wrong with that quote, it doesn’t prepared us for what is coming it simply warns us of something unexpected.
Life is more like continuing to learn to ride a bicycle, and here’s why I think that this saying is closer to what life is like and how it can be of more use to the way we think. What goes into learning to ride a bicycle? As a father who just taught his younger to ride a bike, a lot of mental preparation such as building self confidence, this a crucial step as if there is no one there to encourage you giving up when things get hard feels like your only option. Then a close second in my opinion would be the research, bike riding videos, what do the general population struggle with? in doing research on people who had a similar lifestyle we can see what exactly held them back and what propelled them forward.
Practice: Practice is what comes next, Dictionary.com has this to say about practice, “to perform, or do habitually or usually.” here’s the thing about this though, everyone reading this will think, “ oh yeah, practice riding everyday, Obviously.” No I mean practice falling everyday, practice getting hurt, practice all the things that make riding a bike hard. because when you practice falling, when you practice the failed balance attempts, it becomes so much easier to ride.
Environment: When it comes to learning to ride a bike, learning on a slight hill is probably my preferred way to learn the more obstacles the better, the street I grew up on, had too many dogs, and peoples trucks that had either run out of gas, what I am trying to say is there were a lot of obstacles that I had to dodge when learning how to ride my bicycle, and my parents house was on a bit of a hill, biking down the slight slope was easy, biking up I had to learn how to balance and not hit the vehicles and other obstacles.
In conclusion, learn to ride a bicycle takes a lot of consideration, in our mental state, and our willingness to learn how to get hurt in sort of a controlled manner, it’s all about how we look at learning. and that is for learning anything, if we look at it like we don’t want to do it then it will become that much harder to convince ourselves to learn the task. And like learning to ride a bicycle we can have fun with it, because there are so many tricks that we can learn.
