Life is a lot like riding a bicycle.  We must keep our balance and, in order to do that, we must keep on pedaling. We all get discouraged at times, and sometimes we just feel like giving up.  "What's the use of continuing to make an effort when nothing ever seems to work out right?" we are often tempted to ask.  But such an attitude is self defeating. If we don't continue to try, we lose all hope of things getting better.

We have so often heard clichés like, "If at first you don't succeed, then try again," and "Nothing ventured nothing gained," that many of us get tired of hearing such advice.  This is especially true when we have tried over and over, and still things haven't worked out the way we had hoped. But that's life.  Life is not always fair, and we sometimes have great difficulty understanding why certain things happen to us, or fail to happen to us.

We will never reach our destination on a bicycle trip unless we continue to pedal.  The same is true of life.  Nothing is guaranteed no matter how hard we pedal.  But failure and unhappiness are absolutely guaranteed once we make the decision to stop pedaling. Idleness is one of the greatest contributors to discontent, so we all need to keep busy at something.  For some of us, the harder we pedal in life the happier we are, even if the pedaling does not accomplish what we had hoped.       

It often seems to us that life is so much kinder to others than to us.  We sometimes see people, who do not appear to be pedaling especially hard, getting more from life than we think they deserve. And we often feel that we've been shortchanged by life regardless of how hard we have pedaled.  But do we see the whole picture?  Isn't it possible that some of the people we envy are carrying heavy burdens of which we are not aware?  Isn't it possible that they have pedaled a lot harder than we realize in ways that are not obvious to us? And, even if such is not the case, does it make sense for us to waste time, or mental energy, on envying others?  Is there anything to be gained by doing so?  Wouldn't we be better off if we devoted all our efforts to just pedaling harder?

If we continue to pedal hard throughout our lives, we may still never get where we want to be. But then again we just might.  The important point is that, unless we continue to pedal, we can be sure that we won't get anywhere at all.

Copyright 2014 Allen Smith

TB-54—Posted 06/01/2014