Years ago, I read this quote from Albert Einstein “Life is like riding a bike. To keep your balance, you must keep moving”. It just stuck with me and I wondered how it applied to my life. Here I am today, comparing a life realization to learning how to ride a bike.
In this modern age and time, we are constantly juggling between different things in our life. The biggest buzz nowadays is “Balance, or work–life balance as we call it. Managing our time between our family, our work, ourself and doing things we love. Many times we focus on one aspect so much so that we forget about the others until we are reminded by some unpleasant event that shakes us. By the time we realize, it is often too late. The challenge of not being able to balance has much grievous consequences than meets the eye. Relationships break up when people can’t find time to spend with each other. Mental and physical health goes downhill when the much-needed balance is missing in life. People end up with frustration and depression when they are not able to achieve what they want from life. So, the “Balance” in life is necessary to keep things healthy.
Most of the times, what ends up happening is, instead of learning how to balance we start to drop off things from our life when the going gets tough. We give up on our health, we give on relationships, we give up on the joy we get from doing those little mundane things like gardening, painting or dancing. We give up because we failed to balance well in the past and somewhere we accept that our capacity is limited.
Riding a bike requires one to get the balance right. One needs to keep up irrespective of the falls and bruises! Nobody learns to ride just by watching a you tube video or hearing a bike riding 101 lecture unless they actually do it. Likewise, in life to learn to juggle the different things, we need to keep moving without dropping things that we want to do. It may take several trials or may be the whole life time to just keep trying but the process is much more rewarding and transforming than quitting.
As a matter of the fact, the life force within us is totally dynamic and has limitless potential. Its enthusiastic and energetic. So, not quitting allows for this energy to be expressed. It brings up new skills and expansion of consciousness.
In this whole process, we just need to remember to nurture the most important aspect, which makes it all possible – the life force energy. It is this energy which is source of all creativity, and enthusiasm. It is this energy which when uplifted will help to keep moving.
And just like how a bicycle needs oiling from time to time, we need to spend some time taking care of the life force energy. Meditation and breathing techniques are very powerful practical tools to fuel the life force effortlessly.
