As a child you look at others riding bicycles and
wonder when your turn will come. Then one day you get a bicycle and are
thrilled even when you can’t ride it. You start
learning and soon there is nothing more to learn; you have mastered it thoroughly. Sometimes you ride it very fast — as fast as you
can. At other times you take part in a slow cycle race and
win it by coming last. You even ride with both your hands free.
Now you look for opportunities, or shall I say excuses, to ride. You are completely occupied by the
bicycle and the ride. It becomes the prime activity of your
daily routine. You get out of the bed and look forward to a ride.
But gradually the novelty
wears off. Now some other things catch your fancy — may be a motor bike or may be a guitar or may be something else. The bicycle no more
holds the centre stage of your life. It has been replaced.
Several times a day, you see the bicycle lying abandoned in a corner, but it fails to evoke any
desire to ride. Any attempt to remind you of your early
enthusiasm succeeds only in causing embarrassment to you over your “naïveté”.
Your affair with the bicycle is well and truly over.
And little do you know that you have just finished one of the
most fundamental cycles of life and are about to begin
another. How satisfying a life you lead depends upon your ability to keep the duration between any two of
these cycles to a minimum.
