This is a mountain of bicycles. Literally.
I don’t know how many bicycle frames are in this sculpture, but I imagine it is hundreds if not thousands. How much courage would it take to embark on an ambitious project like this one? A lot, I bet. This brings up another question: How many projects are dropped because the sheer scale of their mere imagining sends us running scared? Loads, I bet.
What a shame. Imagine how many amazing projects have not eventuated beyond the spark of conception because they were dumped in the too hard basket before they were given any oxygen.
We are all so full of potential, but how many of us are too scared to put our work out there? How many of us are too scared even to do the work for fear it will be below standard. An embarrassment. We would rather do nothing, or do little, mediocre work because blending into a beige background is preferable to standing out in bright purple and having others laugh at us.
Sometimes we have witnessed such failures. Even when they have not been our own, we have been so shaken, so scarred by the experience even as a second-hand event, to know we would do anything to avoid a first-hand encounter.
Imagine, just imagine, the rewards that have been missed. Not just missed, but not even conceptualised! Just thinking about it makes me sad. And it gives me courage to not fear the possibility of falling flat on my face. It makes the attempt to realise my potential in even the smallest way something worthwhile, despite the terror of failure.
There is another thing that stops us reaching something greater, and I think it’s fear of the long, big, hard projects. It’s easy enough to spend a little time on something. The investment is not so great, thus the stakes are low and manageable. It’s a gamble where we can afford a loss of blood. So this other impediment to achieving great things is a fear of commitment. Stepping forward is hard, but so is maintaining the stamina.
Big failures sometimes break people. They are hard to come back from. But what else are you going to do with your life? Sometimes, when the choice is between sitting quietly by the fire, knitting, and climbing a mountain in a blizzard, you just have to stand, walk to the door, and put on your hiking boots.
The Life Journey Project 