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Life wisdom by a seven-year-old

 “Keep Pedaling, keep going. You got this; Don’t be scared, maintain your balance”.

I heard my husband saying to our daughter as she was trying to ride her bicycle. She was hesitant to start biking, and after about half an hour of her dad running behind her, she had done a few laps around the park and biked back home.

After she parked her bike, she came to me with a glowing smile on her face – “I did it. I thought I couldn’t do it, but I was able to do it”.

“Of course, you were able to do it, you already learned how to bike last year, and now that the sun is coming out, you can start biking again. Why did you think you couldn’t do it?” I said. We live in a place where there is only 3 months of no-rain in an year, and she was getting an opportunity to ride a bike outside the first time after last summer.

“You see Hon, you are a smart and strong girl. You can do anything you set your mind to, as long as you are confident and work hard towards it.” It was me trying to turn a regular conversation into a teaching moment for her.

She asks “I can do anything, mom? If I work hard and am not scared?”

“Pretty much anything you want”, I said in a matter-of-fact tone.

She looked like she was thinking something for few seconds and says “Mom, I just had a thought. Life is like a bicycle ride. You can’t be scared or lazy. If you are scared, you will lose balance and if you are lazy, you can’t move forward”.

I was speechless. That’s my 7-year-old girl!! How spot on she was!

There I was thinking I could impart some wisdom to her when in fact it is the other way around.

My entire life flashed in front of my eyes – it indeed was like a bicycle ride. The times I lost my balance, it was all because of fear – fear of losing something I have, fear of not getting something I wanted, fear of failing, fear of getting hurt. And the times I felt stuck in my life, I wasn’t working in the right direction, or I have given up on working towards what I wanted.

I’m the rider of my life. I pedal if I want to go, I stop if I need to – What a great analogy she had for me to realize I’m in control of my own life.

There are things that you can’t control in life, just like riding a bike on the road - there could be accidents where you may fall off your bike, there are people who may go faster than you, some people may have much smoother path that they ride on, and so on. Being stuck by the things you can’t control can never help you. If you fall off, you have got to get up, dust off, and keep pedaling to get to where you want to go.

You face a challenge in life, it is like needing to go up the hill, the only way to get over it is to keep pedaling, keep working hard. If life seems too easy, it’s like having to go down the hill, you can safely go by maintaining your balance, by being confident.

When you reach your destination, you are probably exhausted, feel liberated, accomplished, proud of how far you’ve come. You would’ve learned quite a bit along the way, you may even have few regrets for taking some wrong turns. You are now aware of your balance, your pace, and your style. You may be energized to go on another ride, or you may have had enough – the choice is yours to make whether to keep pedaling forward or just cruise along.

She asked me “Do you agree with me, Mom?”

How could I not agree? I can’t wait to see what her metaphorical bike ride has for her – whatever it is, I’m confident she got this!

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