3 Paths On Life’s Adventure — Traps of Youth, Escaping Middle Age, and Using Wisdom to Plan Happiness
A figurative ride on a unicycle and some traps you’ll find along your adventure.
Unknown at birth, you were given a three-spoked unicycle to navigate the path of life.
The three spokes grow with you, and you cannot be stable without all of them. Different things to different people, but in this instance, they are presence, wisdom, and reflection.
Pedaling forward, you move forward. Pedaling backwards, however, is only a brake. If you sit on the brake too long, you will rust, and there is a fire chasing you.
Rust or burn, the way to live is to keep moving. Eventually, you will succumb to the wear and tear you put on your unicycle, but how far you go depends on keeping the three spokes strong.
Having Knowledge Without Wisdom
From the start, your parents do their best to teach you balance, but that’s all they can do. They have their own unicycles to ride.
After they get you started, they put you on a path, and if you’re lucky, they’ll give you a push to get you ahead of the fire. If you’re not lucky, they attach a chain.
Eventually, whether pushed or chained, you will come to a three-way split. This is the first step towards becoming the adult and person you could become.
The middle path climbs straight uphill, touching the clouds. To the left, curving around the mountain, you can see it slope downward. The right path appears flat, but a forest obscures your view. You’re not sure which one to take at first, but in front of you is a map.
Scattered throughout the map are points marked by people that have come before you. Danger signs mark some points. While treasures mark others. There is no sense of their location, or which path will bring you to each one, as they appear side by side.
There are sections of the path that are marked, but they do not fill the entire map. The only part that you can see in totality is the path that led you to where you are. But even that is missing some details.
You vaguely set your sights on a point with treasure that looks like the downhill path can lead you to.
So, you begin down it. Soon enough, the path comes to a sandy beach, but your tires are for a path and not the sand. Your wheel begins to just spin, the fire gradually getting closer and closer, until you pedal furiously, slightly uphill, to get off the sand. Here you find another path.
Living in the Present
When you’re young, often there is no choice but to take the path with all the sand traps. You can only take the path you’re most prepared for, and for most, this is the easy path. It’s also the mindset I see when people follow a YOLO mindset.
The easy path often gets you into your first hardship. It can be get-rich quick schemes, various unhealthy addictions, or the wrong relationships.
When I was younger, I joined a gang, joined fights, and sold weed. I escaped just shy of selling guns and I joined the military — only to marry a woman who wanted me to get killed for the life insurance policy. After that, I spent years smoking weed, wasting away playing video games.
In 2011, my oldest friend OD'd on heroin. That drug claimed a decade each from another friend and an ex-girlfriend. They robbed places and watched others die from that drug.
They all became addicted shortly after I moved away. The guilt that maybe I could have saved them has been one of the hardest things I have tried to overcome. It still makes me put up walls when I try to be open with people.
I went back to school and found out the money game that existed there. I left after losing points from missing class because of a state emergency. (The Susquehanna flood in Sept, 2011.)
Something I heard once is that if you can’t go 30 days without something, it is an addiction.
Mindset shifts such as frustration into fascination, anxiety into excitement, I considered healthy addictions to be obsessions. I prefer to think of working out and writing more as obsessions.
Living in the present moment is powerful, and the only way to live, but you need to couple it with more thoughtful action. If that spoke gets too large, it will become a stake, and it will hold you in the sand traps of life.
Back on the Path
It’s not the same path that brought you to the sand trap, but to a point further down the road. You merge with the beginner’s path again.
You arrive back at a three-way split and the map. You can see now there are more dangers than treasures on the downhill path. It is tempting to take that path again. After all, gravity will be on your side. But fool me once…
You decide instead on the path that looks level. Soon you’re cruising along, but ahead is a forest. You can’t see into its depths for all the trees.
The path gets squishy, and occasionally, you see puddles. Another path leading back to the map is forever in your view. But you stay the path you chose. Surely those puddles are nothing to worry about.
Then you hit the mudhole.
The damp ground holds the fire at bay, but you notice your unicycle rusting more rapidly. Each stroke of the pedal becomes more difficult. You can still see the path that leads to the map.
This hole is the middle class nightmare. Often, people focus on money over more important things, like your relationships and wisdom. People often end up obese, potentially diabetic, conforming to mediocre pursuits, and focusing on escapisms like alcoholism, pills, and binge-watching shows.
I believed all I had to do was keep working hard at my job, and nothing outside of work mattered towards getting more out of life.
I wound up fatalistic, with bosses that wanted to keep me performing at the bottom tier. They told me that moving up is a curse anyway because it requires thinking. We were told to help other departments if we noticed an issue, and then I was reprimanded and told it wasn’t my job. I relapsed into video games and looked to escape my mind by smoking copious amounts of weed when I wasn’t at work.
Don’t wish it was easier, wish you were better. Don’t wish for less problems, wish for more skills. Don’t wish for less challenge, wish for more wisdom. — Jim Rohn
Then through the murkiness…
You can hear the encouragement from others still on that path, and ones that have found their treasures. You can see the sound of their voices create the path back.
It is your mentors, advisors, and the friends that want more for you. They gave you the path back from the sand trap, though you failed to hear them at the time.
With all your might, you get back to the dry path and return to the sign. Your struggles have revealed more of it. You have learned to reflect, to plan, and to listen to others. You have also realized your own truth.
This is why the map shows more. It’s what you have uncovered through attention, struggle, and presence. You know you want neither the easy path nor the path of conformity. You’re ready to face the challenge.
Knowing Where You’ve Been
Living without reflection, you would have made a choice that led you down either of these paths again. Without reflection, your map — your life — would remain obscured.
You hear the excitement from those who have yet to find the sand traps, and you hear the voices saying the level path is still the safest to travel.
These are the calls of the siren.
Gratitude, Reflection, and Planning
“Plans are nothing; planning is everything.” -Dwight D. Eisenhower
Traveling those paths, you develop gratitude for the lessons each one contained. You’re grateful for the voices that called to you and led you out of your traps. Grateful that you learned to keep living, but not to fall for the same mistakes twice.
With shaky confidence in a truth you have written, you take the path that starts as a gradual uphill climb.
There is effort, but not as much when you were escaping the sand trap, nor as much when the mud bogged you down.
You’ve planned properly, having uncovered so much of the map since your last meeting.
There are boulders along it, but you can see them clearly and move around them, occasionally pushing against one to move it out of your way.
It’s always uphill, but you see all around more clearly. You can see others at their treasure spots, and you see that none of them were without an uphill climb. They don’t connect to your path and you keep pushing.
You see others stuck in the sand and bogged down in the mud. Yell to them. Cheer them on. You cannot leave your path to help them, just as others couldn’t leave their own to help you. But you can whoop and holler with the same encouragement that led you to try again.
As you continue, there are piles of treasure downhill from you. However, you don’t recall seeing them as treasures on the map.
You reflect on what happened when you took the downhill path, which seems like a memory belonging to someone else. The easy path is no longer part of your plan.
“Planning is a skill and an art which takes a lifetime to master.” -Paddick Van Zyl
Your plan is to keep climbing, to travel into the clouds. Life is now about your decisions, not choices. The difference is that society and people will give you choices; decisions are actions you take.
Climbing higher, you glance back at the splits where you could have taken those turns, but they were only to the edges of a cliff. Spots that appeared as treasures when you approached them were only an approach to bigger traps.
Eventually, your pedaling slows, the fire long gone, but the rust has overtaken your pedals. A realization that the uphill path was the adventure all along. The climb was not as difficult as it appeared. You look out over the view, and just relax. As your eyes close, you give one last yell, “I made it, and you can, too!”
Follow me, I know a shortcut!
