Learning to Ride: A Bicycle and Life

I learnt riding a bicycle after trying for three long years. I was initially nudged into the practice by my elders who felt that it would be a great exercise for me to lose weight.  However, my practice lacked all the zeal and enthusiasm of an interested learner. I was rather guarded and restrained in my attempts to control the simple machinery.

The first phase of perfunctory effort fizzled out without much or any accomplishment on my part. My father the preferred guide out of the two parents, left no stone unturned to train me. I was taken to the air force runway to make the ride smooth for me. Strong pair of arms of the most trusted and patient orderly pushed my hefty weight on the bicycle many a times. Expert riders who were a little older than me accompanied me at the crack of the dawn, just to motivate me to push the paddle. The whole drama ended with numerous frustrated attempts with the entire bevy of trainers giving up on a disinterested learner that was me. 

The ordeal was re-visited the following year when again my elders decided that I should learn riding a bicycle because it simply had many benefits for a growing-up girl of 9-10 years who was actually growing out of proportion! There was a replay of events of the previous year which again ended in a fiasco for all those who had pinned their hopes on me.

The succeeding year something different happened. My only friend and constant companion had learnt to ride the bicycle and she was no longer available to play with me. Her vivid stories of early morning rides to explore the vast fields within the air force campus, evening races on the abandoned part of the runway or post-dinner night sorties to the hostile camp in search for a stolen ball or frisbee; made me feel deprived and left out of all the fun she was having with the other children.

It was time for me to get down to work. I decided out of my own volition to master the art of riding the bicycle. My earlier enthusiastic and encouraging trainers expressed lack of free time on their hands to guide me on this occasion. I turned to my mother and beseeched her, whose loving heart gave in to my teary-eyed pleas.

I began my practice not on the smooth tarmac of the runway but on the ordinary road outside my home, embellished with numerous pot-holes. My mother a strict and vociferous task-master did not spare me any abrupt turn of the handle while I tried to maintain my precarious balance on the bicycle. Ten-minutes into the first session, I experienced my worst fall of the entire episode of learning to ride a bicycle. The bleeding knee on that day and the stiff one on the following day, did not deter me from practicing. The results were extra-ordinary. I was riding the bicycle on my own within a week.

A mammoth sense of achievement engulfed me and I rode high on the surge of new-found confidence. Perched on my bicycle, I played with the wind. I even won a single-ride and a double-ride race with my former companions. The whole ordeal had also opened my heart to the experience of bliss in solitude. I had learnt some anticipated and some unanticipated but beneficial lessons during the process.

I always draw upon this episode whenever I am faced with a challenging and new task in my life. This is how facing a new challenge or crisis is simply learning to ride the bicycle for all of us:

• ·        Nobody can force me to face and overcome a challenge or crisis till I want out of my free will to do so.
• ·        I learn to overcome and defang the challenge after persistent efforts, paying no heed to small and big falls that I experience in the process.
• ·        Nobody and not even I ever assumed that riding a bicycle was beyond my reach. I mastered the skill and similarly I can master any task that I set my heart, mind, body and soul to.
• ·        I became a better or an expert rider not because I was able to practice on a better road, in better surroundings, with a better trainer or a better piece of equipment. It was all because of my will and determination. In fact the old bicycle became a better ride because of the cyclist riding it.
• ·        So in a challenging or crisis situation, it is for me to step up to the plate rather than pointing fingers at the factors outside me for causing such a situation. The situation is not a problem but just an opportunity for me to grow.
• ·        Till the time I do not accept the challenge and overcome it, the same or similar situation will keep confronting me, forcing me to take action.
• ·        The results of overcoming a challenge are multifarious and multidimensional. I not only garner the apparent benefits but also unravel some concealed advantages which may be exclusively available to me, because of who I am and how I deal with situations in my life.

I can only conclude by saying that every challenge or crisis in life is as easy as learning to ride the bicycle. Every time I am confronted with a challenge, I look for the lesson in it for me to learn, rather than the difficulties in the changed scenario. I simply have to move out of my comfort zone to pleasantly surprise myself and the others. 

It is all about me- always has been and always will be.

The Biggest Lie Told to All Mothers!

I am taking a break at my parents’ place these days and this comes after a long spell of incessant action marked by a book launch, revamping my academy, starting two new projects and working towards the accomplishment of a personal aspiration of years.

There! I think I have established my case well of needing and deserving a break. And there could not have been a more opportune time to go for one, which I am seriously questioning now, than the summer vacation of my two children.

Well, let me tell you this: it is the BIGGEST LIE being sold to every mother across the globe that she can go on a BREAK accompanied by her children! And innocent, blinded by love, gullible mothers readily pop this candy of a lie into their mouths and minds, all the while believing that they will actually get a break from the fist-clenching, hair-pulling and teeth-gritting job of motherhood.

The reality of this farce was rubbed into my being in a rather bizarre manner last night.

After having given up on spending quality time with my children at night when no go-to-bed curfews were imposed, I decided to sleep alone in peace. Everything was perfect as I retired to my solitary room to finish the novel that had reached its gripping climax. Let me inform you, I was able to do so with much relish and undisturbed engagement.

I decided to savour some old melodies on my play-list and allow them to gently serenade me to halcyon sleep. I was able to achieve this as well. The catastrophe struck after this.

As I was drifting into deep sleep, I felt through my closed eye-lids, a beam of blue light move around in my room. ‘I am seeing the Divine! Such peace…’, I thought. I settled further into my comforter and let out a deep sigh of relaxation. However, now the blue light was fixed at a spot and that was my face. I opened my eyes to find my nine-year old son standing tentatively in front of my bed.

“What is it?”, I snapped.

“There’s something ominous brown and green in colour with huge prickly legs flying around in our room!” Fear writ large on his charming face and popping out of his huge naughty eyes.

‘There goes a night of rest! Now which demons will I have to slay before I can rest my head peacefully on this welcoming pillow?’, I thought. I reluctantly climbed out of my bed and followed my son who was carrying his sister’s mobile to serve as a torch in the dimly-lit 20-step long passage from their room to mine. Let me mention here that he crossed his grandparents’ room on the way to mine.

My daughter 13 years of age, tried to salvage the situation as soon as I entered the room. “I told him, it is just a small insect. We could sleep just fine.” She said this to me while standing on the bed and her eyes following the exuberant cricket’s hops around the room.

Exasperated with the whole hullabaloo at the midnight-hour, I took a plastic tumbler from the kitchen, trapped the brown-green fiend and dragged it out of my children’s room. The whole drama ended without any casualties and desired and undesired violence.

“I can’t sleep here now! I’ll sleep with you mamma.” My son was marching out of the room ahead of me, with his pillow and comforter, sans the torch, as he said this.

I resigned to my destiny and went to bed with him. I was happy just to be asleep.

P.S.- Despite the travails and exasperating tests of motherhood, every mother basks in the UNCONDITIONAL LOVE of her children. And such episodes become fodder for the following day’s animated conversation, blog-posts and vibrant repository of bitter-sweet memories. Like my mother remarked to my sulking today, “Have you forgotten your own childhood, when a broom was always kept by my bed-side instead of my favourite book?”