Autumn Road: Oil on Canvas Panel -- 9x12.
More years ago than I care to remember, a buddy and I bicycled from Alaska down to Ushuaia, the island at the tip of South America. Then we took a boat up to the continent and bicycled north into Argentina. We flew to Florida, then bicycled back to Oregon by way of Maine. It took us two and a half years.
During that time, we stayed at the homes of many kind and generous people. As we described to them our adventures, a familiar look would come into our hosts' eyes (usually the men), and they would dreamily comment, "I wish I could do what you're doing."
"You can," we replied with all the naivete of 20-some-year-old bachelors with no jobs, kids, mortgages, or responsiibilities. "It's just one pedal at a time."
Years later, now that I have a job, kids, house, domestic animals, and numerous responsibilities, I more fully understand where these people were coming from, and while I would no longer blithely advise them to just pack up and go, I still firmly believe that dreams are achieved "one pedal at a time."
This concept is not new -- the ancient storytellers taught their listeners the advantages of operating like a turtle, with its steady, plodding pace, rather than like the stop-and-start hare. I find this myself with hiking companions -- those that rush forth and then abruptly stop for a short rest, then spurt on for a shorter period and stop for a longer rest -- don't travel nearly as far or successfully as those who choose a reasonable pace and stick with it.
Dreams are big things, and they are not achieved overnight. But each day, some small, incremental step can be taken, some necessary task addressed, some question answered. Some days, the steps need to be bigger, the tasks are heftier and more demanding, the questions more difficult and complicated. Other days, you just rest. Over a series of days, after two-and-a-half years in our case many years ago, you find that you have traveled 26,500 miles, all on a bicycle -- in the Darien Jungle, we carried the bicycles; in the high Andes of Chile, we got lost; in the Midwestern United States, we huddled behind a highway bridge and watched a tornado pass close enough that it was exciting to talk about later, but not at all enjoyable at the time. We met people of all types and backgrounds, ate wildly different food, and slept under stars so incredibly bright in an alpine Bolivian countryside so incredibly dark that I compare all night skies to it since.
Nowadays, my bicycling tends to be to the local grocery store on an errand, or up the valley on a jaunt with one of my kids. My goals and dreams shift with time, but I still have them, and I still work toward fulfilling them -- one pedal at a time.
Original Fine Art Oil Painting by Steve Henderson of Steve Henderson Fine Art
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