Run the Race.
My littlest brother (in all aspects of the term littlest), was born the year after we moved to the farm. In the early years of us younger siblings, we were not allowed to bike ride the country roads where large machinery jostled down the road with their drivers occasionally gazing off into the neighbor’s fields checking to see who all had their corn planted yet. Our only option was shuttling around the looped gravel driveway on our ramshackle bikes. Fenders clacking and dust clouds rising from well worn tires. For my little brother, who had not yet learned to ride, the dust rose from his fast moving sneakers.
He yearned for the pinnacle of that seemingly spirited flight, biking. I’m sure he tired of the push, pedal, pummeling crash repetitiveness of attempting to acquire the needed mechanics as much as my siblings and I did in our assistance of trying to help him reach his goal. We’d much rather be experiencing our own glorious breeze of cutting through the time and space always seeking to tether us down.
My little brother wanted it so badly, he took the handlebars and ran alongside his bike trying to keep up with us as we crunched in circles of grit and gravel.
He could see himself doing it.
See Yourself Doing it.
My father in his late eighties once told me he wished he could run. Though his thought was undoubtedly spurred by a young gentleman arm pumping past my parent’s patio, I don’t think he was talking about the kind of running people do to get an aerobic workout. I don’t recall ever seeing my father run, (though I am on the tail end of nine siblings), except for a few hobbling steps to catch the hay wagon to hop on for a ride.
I’m certain he was referring to the days of his youth when he played impromptu games of baseball with horse apples. (For those of you with no rural background, that term applies to the dried roundish balls of poo that make up horse manure.) Effort would have been applied to make it to an imaginary first base, though technically one wouldn’t have had to have been a fast runner in that situation. For if the batter smacked the smithereens out of a horse apple pitched to them, it would have taken a fair bit of time to find a piece large enough to tag someone out. But I digress.
The point is, he followed that statement of desire to run with a contemplative assertion, “I can see myself running.”
Stay on Track.
I can’t see myself being published. It’s an abstract concept, not a solitary action one can visualize. But I can see in my mind’s eye a child opening a book containing my story and art and sharing it with someone else. Or at least my heart can conjure that sense of completion.
In order to reach that goal however, I must do what my little brother did. I must keep running around the driveway. Staying on the course. Gripping the handlebars, alternately pedaling and crashing until I see what the motion of success consists of. It is imperative I do what both my brother and father did: See myself doing it. Then take it farther than my dad, in not letting that momentum fall to the wayside.
See. Be. Stay.
Happy creating.