A Bike Without A Chain

What do you see when you visualize a bicycle? Wheels, handle bars, peddles.

What’s a bike without a chain? How important is grit, tenacity, and perseverance?

The wheel is one of the most wildly used tools since 3500 B.C.

Its purpose is simple yet meaningful despite the multiple uses it is able to provide. What good are wheels that allow us to move forward? If we don’t have the drive to push past the flat, bumpy and uphill surfaces.

If we are representations of a metaphoric bicycle; our decisions guide us like handle bars. Our wheels are our dreams and ideas. The peddles are us taking the beginning steps toward those goals we aspire to obtain. The chain is the grit, tenacity, and perseverance needed to push forward until the expected end is reached.

Let us break it down further.

The handles bars help guide and assist us along our path. This can be interpret as our own decision making. Only your hands are able to guide the path that your bike takes. It behooves one to know that while decisions are more than often influenced, the ultimate decision is always in your hands. Every decision has a consequence, good or bad. Depending on each decision it can send you down an unique path with its own bumps, dips, hills and even the occasional obstacle in the pathway. In most cases seek the road less traveled, for the journey will be one to remember and one that will bring about the most internal growth

The peddles are the change engine to the bike, linked together by the chain. They serve in a vital step exerting force from one’s body to the peddle that moves the chain. The peddles are the initial steps, phone calls, emails, questions formed in pursuit of ones aspirations in life. Without the peddle the chain does not move. While the bike is still able to move it lacks the drive, distance and tenacity to try the roads less traveled.

The Chain. Without the chain, the force that is implied by the legs to the peddle would be meaningless. Without the chain the bike would remain stationary. It would depend on the slope from a hill, rather than being able to move consistently by force exerted upon it.

The chain is not the most admired part of the bicycle. Its greasy, dirty and often neglected within the maintenance of a bike. We often neglect our own chains. Our chains are our fight within us, it is a continual link of reasons why one cannot and must not quit. Grit, tenacity, courage, resolve, perseverance, resilience, heart, fortitude; all are links in the chain that keep one motivated in pursuing that which at times seems impossible.

Maintaining our motivation is tough and a dirty job. Especially when life grabs a hold of your bicycle like the wind blowing extremely hard almost knocking one off balance. Things always seem impossible until their completed. It is only when we reflect and look back on the journey that we realize what helped to accomplish what was once thought as wild dream.

The way things may seem and the way they truly are is all based on perspective. When our chains become rusted and dry often times needing replacement this is due to our lack of the proper perspective and attitude. Your attitude determines your altitude. When we have the proper attitude and perspective we continually provide maintenance to our chains on our own bicycles. When we neglect the up keep of our chain we miss opportunities and connections that would carry us to new paths. An decaying bicycle chain is no place for the road less traveled. For it requires the proper chain to ensure one reaches their desired end. The same could be said about the mindset for such a journeys that led to high aspirations.

What’s a bike without a chain? Its a plan without execution, its a dream without vision. Its the drive needed or the lack there of. How well do you tend to that which will ultimately help you succeed?

“Good, Better, Best. Never let it rest. Until your Good is Better. And your Better is Best.”