Pedal Harder

If someone told you that you could ride that bike, that all it would take would be to climb up the silver pole, position yourself on the seat, put your feet on the pedals and your hands on the handlebars and fly that bike out over the green leafy park below it, would you believe it?

If someone told you that you could leave your husband, the one who slammed the car door on your leg last week, that all it would take would be to pack a bag, get cash out of the bank, figure out a safe place to be, and decide whether to take your children with you or leave them with him since, you know, he’s never done anything to hurt them, would you start packing?

If someone told you that you could go to college, be anything you want to be, a doctor or a lawyer, even though you don’t know anyone who went to college, not in your family or the whole neighborhood, and you would have to move to a different city where you wouldn’t know anyone and there would be no one to help you out when things got rough and you know in your heart you will fail, would you
mail the application?

Or would you say, “I don’t see myself doing that.”

I can’t ride that bike in the sky.

I can’t leave my dangerous husband.

I can’t go to college.

Isn’t this what people do? Rule things in or out based on what only they know about themselves, their fear, dependency, comfort, confidence? Still, other people will persist in telling them what they should do. Using only the external data – just what they see on the outside – as evidence, friendly observers will urge riding the bike, leaving the husband, going to college. And when the subject of their suggestions doesn’t do these things, they opine and analyze, jack up their persuasive efforts, and then, sometimes, get frustrated and walk away.

It makes no sense.

A person knows where his own circle is drawn, the circle that holds the possible and walls off the impossible. Nothing anyone says or urges will make the circumference larger or more fluid. Only the person whose circle it is can change it.

This is perpetually a hard thing to grasp and harder yet to accept.

I see this with friends and family all the time. So much conversation devoted to what other people should do. So much puzzlement about why some people are able to do extraordinary, unexpected things and others are frozen in a tiny world.

I see it in my professional life – a widespread ethos of knowing what’s best for other people, be them homeless or unemployed or people with mental illness or addictions and intense frustration when people persist in defining their own limits.

There is a beautiful difference between offering alternatives and prescribing a solution. This is what you could do versus this is what you should do.

In other words, I could ride that bike. I might ride that bike. I’ll let you know.